I even ended up buying a Casascius coin from Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin.īeing involved with Bitcoin has absolutely changed my life, and while not being able to contribute to Bitcoin development, I wanted to give something back. Over the years I have acquired beautiful collectibles, made a lot of new friends, and met very interesting collectors. I decided to sell most of my precious metals for bitcoins and use them to buy and trade physical bitcoins, which is a decision I never ended up regretting. In 2015 I got invited to an IRC channel, dedicated to bitcoin collectibles, where I learned a lot more about the world of physical bitcoins.
I ordered my first physical bitcoin, a brass 0.5 BTC Casascius coin, and spent more time learning about Bitcoin’s fundamentals. After reading the Bitcoin whitepaper and Satoshi’s archived e-mails I became highly intrigued by the idea of combining scarcity with a decentralized digital asset. At first I was a bit hesitant since they looked like simple brass tokens and I had no idea what Bitcoin was.
In fact, Casascius coins are responsible for introducing me to Bitcoin in late 2013.Īs a longtime “regular” precious metals collector I ran into Casascius coins on a forum. Physical bitcoins are great for starting conversations and introducing people to Bitcoin, because you have something tangible to show them. Some designs could be called knockoffs while others were highly original and progressive. Mike Caldwell has inspired many others into designing and creating their own physical bitcoins, resulting in a wide variety of coins. In the next few years Mike Caldwell released several different Casascius coins and bars, ranging from a loaded value of 0.1 BTC to a staggering 1000 BTC. Afterwards, the drive is typically overwritten with a new operating system, and used for some other temporary purpose”. “After the addresses have been generated and printed to paper, the entire operating system installation is completely destroyed by booting the machine to a Linux Live CD, and executing cp /dev/zero /dev/sda until the command reports "No space left on device”. Mike Caldwell also posted an extensive statement on his website explaining how the private keys were generated and destroyed: Owning Casascius coins does mean that you’re trusting a third party with generating your private keys, although there have been zero issues with redeeming Casascius coins to this date. This was one of the security measures to prevent people from selling redeemed coins and passing them off as still being loaded. Peeling the hologram leaves behind a honeycomb pattern on the coin which makes it impossible to redeem the BTC without destroying the hologram. In order to redeem the BTC you would have to peel the hologram and import the private key into your Bitcoin wallet.
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