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Bitcoins get physical

casascius.com

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Re: Bitcoins get physical

#13

Post by steve8918 »

It's an interesting souvenir and definitely nice to look at, but once you spend your BTC online, the intrinsic value (the BTC) and the store of value (the coin) become separated, and the coin becomes worthless. In fact, I don't even know how money would get exchanged... if you gave someone the coin, it still doesn't confer ownership. It's essentially an anonymous IOU, meaning it has no value.

Re: Bitcoins get physical

#14

Post by kiba »

omid wrote: post #4

This just feels wrong. Physical coins provide peer-to-peer non-anonymous transactions instead of distributed anonymous ones, that is what Bitcoin is about.

How they're going to track you if you exchange physical coins?

Re: Bitcoins get physical

#16

Post by chwahoo »

runn1ng wrote: post #15

I don't get it. If I recieve a physical bitcoin, how do I know it was not previously "redeemed"?

To redeem the coin, you have to peel back a sticker. The hologram for peeled coins takes on a honeycomb appearance according to the link.

Re: Bitcoins get physical

#17

Post by 0x12 »

runn1ng wrote: post #15

I don't get it. If I recieve a physical bitcoin, how do I know it was not previously "redeemed"?

You don't. Even better, this would be great as a scam, if you simply count on it being handed a couple of times from person to person before someone decides to check the code online. Who are you going to complain to if it turns out not to work at redemption time?

Would you accept one of these without verifying that it has indeed not been redeemed. How do you know that your coin is the only coin with that particular code in it without redeeming it?

Re: Bitcoins get physical

#18

Post by iliis »

steve8918 wrote: post #13

It's an interesting souvenir and definitely nice to look at, but once you spend your BTC online, the intrinsic value (the BTC) and the store of value (the coin) become separated, and the coin becomes worthless. In fact, I don't even know how money would get exchanged... if you gave someone the coin, it still doesn't confer ownership. It's essentially an anonymous IOU, meaning it has no value.

> if you gave someone the coin, it still doesn't confer ownership

It does because the coin has the private key. Maybe it's better to think of it as a key to a (public) safe. The key represents the right to open this safe. So, by giving you the key, I give you the ownership to the content of the safe. (However, if I have another copy of the key it get's problematic.)

> It's essentially an anonymous IOU

Which is exactly the same as normal cash. The only difference is that you can destroy them without really loosing the money. So you have a worthless piece of metal. You can do the same with your normals coins (eg. melt them down), but then the worth is just gone ;)

Re: Bitcoins get physical

#19

Post by ThaddeusQuay2 »

Does a pile of eight bitcoins equal a bytecoin? If so, then a single bitcoin would indeed be "a bit", because: "In the U.S., the "bit" as a designation for money dates from the colonial period, when a common unit of currency was the Spanish milled dollar worth 8 Spanish reales. As a way of making change, these dollars were cut into eight pie-slice shaped pieces which were called "bits". (For this reason, the whole coin was known as a "piece of eight".) Each eighth-dollar bit was then worth 12.5 cents, "two bits" was a quarter of a dollar (25 cents), "four bits" was a half-dollar (50 cents) and "six bits" was 75 cents."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_(money)#United_States

Re: Bitcoins get physical

#20

Post by exit »

wow, economics aside, i love the motto "vires in numeris" (= "strength in numbers")

whatever becomes of bitcoins, for the first time in a long time i've felt like i live in the future.

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