Digital Bitcoins Become Real, Shiny
September 27th, 2011
If like me, you’ve never heard of Bitcoins before, let me explain. Bitcoin is a digital currency that basically allows payments without needing centralized payment processors. You don’t need any stinkin’ banks and their greedy scandals and since you don’t need banks, the fees are super low. They are transferred from person-to-person over the Internet, worldwide.
These coins are generated all over the Internet with a free app called a Bitcoin miner. You mine your coins, store them in your wallet and then you can spend them. It was all digital, until now.
Now someone has created real silver Bitcoin coins in 1 gm silver rounds, stamped with the Bitcoin symbol, bringing them into the real world. That makes these the first digital currency to take a physical form. They look cooler than our currency. It’s not like you can use these at the corner shop, but at least they could be a good investment because they are pure silver. Silver, like gold, is going up, up, up.
[via Therichtimes]
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Categories: Design Strange + Wonderful
This article is a bit misguided – the silver coins are not “real physical Bitcoins” they are just silver stamped with a logo.
BUT – there IS a real physical Bitcoin, found here: https://www.casascius.com/
That coin actually embeds a code on the coin itself, making each one worth exactly one bitcoin.
Interesting. I was under the impression that they could be exchanged for Bitcoin currency, but the ones you mention with the embedded codes are directly tied to the Bitcoin value.
Thanks for the clarification.
Either way, it seems like the cost of the actual coins is going to eat into the value of the Bitcoin, and these are strictly collectible items.
I just got some of the casascius coins in the mail yesterday.. They’re a little light, but they look great, and the side with the holographic tamper proof sticker to cover the recovery code on it looks fantastic..
The current coins are 1 BTC coins (about 5 USD right now), but they are working on a 25 BTC coin ($125). They’ll have a little more wiggle room with the 25 BTC coin to make it look fancier.
The neat thing about a physical BTC coin too is that you can use them like an offline wallet. You can deposit money to them without breaking the seal and turn your 1 BTC coin into a 1000 BTC coin if you like. It doesn’t look any different though, so you’ve got to be careful not to mix them up when you’ve done that. You can check the balance of a casascius coin without breaking the seal though.
I’d be afraid I’d lose my 1000 BTC coin under the sofa cushion.
Oh so he decided to take my advice and let people have a wallet coin? According to our chat logs he wasn’t ‘interested’ in such a thing. Interesting.
up up up faster then gold…
If you want to have your first Bitcoin, without using bitcoin miner app,
you can buy it by phone or SMS at http://www.btc-direct.fr
1. As already mentioned, this isn’t Bitcoin, it’s silver. If you want to help make someone else rich, then go ahead and buy some of it.
2. Putting BTC into coins is a ridiculously horrible idea. Any “authentic coined BTC” is BTC out of circulation, which is a bad thing. BTC belongs in circulation, not on a shelf for display as a collector’s item.
BTC will never take off until people stop trying to make money on it and stop exchanging it with other currencies. For BTC to become a success, people need to use only BTC (work for BTC in payment, pay for goods with BTC) and forget about any other currency. That’s how a currency works.
I’m glad you’re a fan of Bitcoins, but you’re a bit misguided.
It does not harm the Bitcoin economy to have Bitcoins “removed” from circulation. Consider the opposite – if more Bitcoins were added to circulation, does that increase the success of the currency? No.
Storing a Bitcoin in the form of a metal coin is no different than storing it in one’s electronic wallet – in both cases the coin is being saved by the owner and is “out of circulation.”
And any call to “use only BTC” or “forget about any other currency” is fallacious as well. Bitcoin’s success does not require an abandonment of alternatives. In fact, the easier it is to move in and out of Bitcoins, the better the chances that Bitcion will be successful.
> if more Bitcoins were added to circulation, does that increase the success of the currency? No.
I completely disagree. The western world exists on the principle of an ever-expanding economy. This means more production from the same resources. This can only happen by money transacting faster. (A $1 bill sitting in your pocket all day is worth $1. A $1 bill that was exchanged 9 times in a day is worth $10.) Holding onto money keeps its value at a minimum. The only thing worse is destroying the money (and in the long term, that really isn’t much worse).
> the easier it is to move in and out of Bitcoins, the better the chances that Bitcion will be successful.
I disagree here as well. As long as people keep moving in-and-out of BTC, the currency has no chance of establishing its own worth, because its only worth is what people are willing to trade other currencies for it. If, however, a lot of useful services and products were available in BTC (say, 100 BTC for a loaf of bread) and jobs were available paying in BTC (say, paying 300,000 BTC a month), then BTC would finally have a value of its own. And nobody would give a damn about dollars, euros or whatever.
Right now BTC is absolutely tied to trading prices, which is crazy. People who claim to sell products in BTC are actually using dollar prices, and just converting to BTC for that moment. That is horrible. As long as this kind of crap continues, BTC has no chance.
I can only hope that BTC eventually becomes totally unprofitable for trading so that it can finally begin to be used as a real currency.
An “ever-expanding economy” does not require an ever-expanding supply of money. That’s a fallacy. You’re confusing money with wealth. A growing economy with steady money supply results in prices which fall over time… the world is not used to that, because it’s addicted to fiat inflationary paper currencies, but it works just fine.
And you said, “I can only hope that BTC eventually becomes totally unprofitable for trading so that it can finally begin to be used as a real currency.” Oh brother…
First of all, it is being used as a real currency right now. I use it almost daily actually, both to buy things and to sell my work for payment.
Second of all, the day there is no money to be made in trading Bitcoins is the day Bitcoin has died. Traders add efficiency to markets and profit by doing so – they bring future price expectations into the present to help hasten market signaling. Bitcoin will be profitable for traders for a long time, probably forever.
Third, every “real” currency in the world is inundated with traders making profit. Dollars, euros, gold, etc. All markets have traders in them… that’s what makes them markets.
If you want to help promote Bitcoin, start offering valuable products and service for it, and help teach others about its qualities… but please don’t give them misinformation like “profitable trading must cease!” =)
You’re missing my point. Let us say that in France a loaf of bread costs 1 euro. If someone where to think of that in dollar prices, that may be $1.40. If the dollar tanks, it may be $1.80. If the euro tanks, it may be $1.10. But for a person in France living with the euro, it is always remains 1 euro. The point is that the cost of that bread in that community with that currency is irrelevant to currency exchange rates.
With BTC it is exactly the opposite at the moment. Every website offering BTC prices is actually offering dollar prices. They are simply converting on-the-fly based on MtGox rates to BTC prices. That’s why 3 months ago I could buy bread for 0.03 BTC and today it costs 0.3 BTC. That is ridiculous and it is because BTC is bound to currency exchanges and has not established its own independent economy.
OK, here’s the thing.. When the dollar is weak, things cost us more right here in the US. It’s not as immediate, but it’s definitely the case. That bakery (more likely the farm selling the grain actually) will sell that loaf of bread to someone from Canada, or overseas if they can get more money for it that way… They’ve got to feed their kids too, and they’re going to do it however they can best accomplish this.
There was a time when that wasn’t as true, but we live in a very global economy now, where Iceland’s economy can falter because of bad US home loans given to poor credit risk by US banks.
The more done in BTC, the better.. That will help stabilize BTC in the long run, but everyone needs to be able to do everything and anything they want to with their currency.. Even burn it. I lost 182 bitcoins in a hard drive crash. That’s the ultimate version of taking them out of circulation.. It better not damage bitcoin too much, cause I’m wasn’t the first, and I’m sure I wont’ be the last..
At some point, bitcoin will just have to switch to using 16 bits if it ever gets enough use to warrent it.. That’s how it’s designed to deal with too many coins out of circulation, or not enough coins for any other reason.. We just take the existing coins, and slice them thinner.
BTCfan – like it or not, the US dollar is far more stable/less volatile than the Bitcoin right now. People will price goods based on the dollar for the foreseeable future, and that’s fine. Bitcoin cannot just “have a value” without a history of previous pricing indicators.
As Bitcoin stabilizes, and the market grows, you may see people price in Bitcoin instead of basing it on the exchange rate. But that is far in the future and will happen very gradually.
What you are pointing out is not a failure of the bitcoin economy, but rather a symptom of the fact that it’s brand new. It’s not anything to be concerned with.
1) You’re confusing money, and the economy. They are separate things. One is just used to facilitate the other.
2) Bitcoin will never be an ever-expanding currency. Someday there will be nearly 21 million of them, and then no more.. period. With any luck though, there will be ever continuing deflation, which indicates an ever expanding economy.
3) A $1 bill getting exchanged 10 times a day, is still just worth whatever you exchanged it for. Is the Japanese Yen a failure? It takes like a trillion of them to make a dollar. Maybe bitcoin being pulled from the economy will make the dollar a failure then because it’ll take like a trillion dollars to make a bitcoin. With wide use, that’ll have to happen anyway because there is the 21 million BTC cap.
4) Any currency that doesn’t allow you to save money is useless.
5) I’ll give you that stuffing 1000 BTC into a single coin is probably a bad idea especially if the coin is marked 1 BTC, but putting a single BTC into a coin marked as such is just fine. It might not have been tracked in the p2p database, but 2 of my IRL BTC coins were used to pay for my portion of lunch yesterday. The other techie that I was willing, nah excited, to accept them for my half of lunch. My actual plan was to hand them out to people that I thought might be interested in bitcoin.. Getting started is tough with all the hoops you need to go through to get USD turned into some BTC, so I figured now they can just hand me 20 USD, and I can hand them 4 BTC.. simple.. that’s what BTC needs to be successful. Of course, counterfeiting could certainly be a problem, but I don’t think you’ll find any physical currency that is immune to that. The catch is, of course, that you’ll find out someday the hard way when you peel the back and try to spend it.. I guess that makes the fact that BTC is impossible to counterfeit kinda a downside in some situations.. Huh.. never thought I’d say that..
6) You can buy and do all that with BTC today.. I’ll personally sell you as many loafs of bread as you like at 100 BTC per loaf. I’ll take the hit for the good of the economy.
> I’ll personally sell you as many loafs of bread as you like at 100 BTC per loaf.
Give me a job that pays 1000 BTC an hour, and I’ll be happy to buy bread from you at 100 BTC per loaf.
I am surprised that these silver rounds are being described as “real digital bitcoins” when these are simply (sweet looking) silver rounds with bitcoin themed artwork and nothing more. In contrast, the “physical bitcoins” sold at casascius.com are the real thing, each worth a digital bitcoin.
Trivia: Thai’s baht use similar symbol (with only one vertical line) ฿.
Shut up, spammer.