Bitcoin Forum

Would it be worth it to create a gigantic physical Bitcoin? Check out this $1 million Candian maple leaf gold coin: http://coins.about.com/b/2007/05/05/canadian-mint-issues-1000000-face-value-coin.htm. Yes, this would be a publicity stunt. I'm thinking the gigantic physical Bitcoin could be 100,000 BTC (to roughly match $1 million in current prices) with the private address covered by a huge hologram that would have to be removed with special tools (if anyone wanted to get the private address). Thoughts?

LMAO

Awesome

I think it would require having $1M first.

lol

I think I want you to tell us before you buy the $1M of BTC ;)

I think this would be perfect for Casascius!  It would be great publicity, even if nobody buys it.

Think bigger. :P

What did you have in mind?

Lol, this story reminded me of another one...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money

I really feel lucky compared to these guys, because I'm able to carry my wealth allot easier without overhead, just in my head.

Wow, that was an awesome read. Thank you.

QFT

I bet we can relate it to Bitcoin somehow :P

Since weex said to 'think bigger', perhaps we should make a physical bitcoin the size of a Yap stone?

You bet  :)

Interesting part starts from minute 2:00 - http://blip.tv/amherstmedia/making-money-gavin-andresen-ignite-amherst-4789326

I would weld a manhole cover over that private key.

Yap stones are very similar to Bitcoin.   In Bitcoin we use terms like "sending coins" but the reality is you never send them to the recipients.   You announce you are transfering ownership to the bitcoin community and miners make a lasting record of that announcement.  Your wallet knows you have 123.456 BTC because it looks at all these "announcements" (transactions) and tallys them up.

Yap stones were never/rarely moved.    Wealth was transferred by announcing it to the community.   Ownership was determined by consensus.  If you owned the stone at the river bend it was only because the consensus of the community said you did.  Yap stones were an analog precursor to the Bitcoin network.  With physical stones at unique locations being the equivalent of Bitcoin addresses and oral traditions/stories being the human equivalent of the blockchain.  Double spend was prevented because ownership transfer was a big deal and the new owner would make sure the community was aware.  They weren't fungible or divisible however and it wouldn't scale beyond a community of trusted members but Bitcoin has more in common with Yap stones than any modern payment system.

A very apt analogy. We always speak in terms of sending bitcoins, but the reality is that they never go anywhere. Rather authority over them is just assigned to another signer. As long as the village agrees that you own them then you can announce that you have given them to someone else.

This talk by Gavin referencing Yap Stones (http://blip.tv/amherstmedia/making-money-gavin-andresen-ignite-amherst-4789326) is part of what got me so excited about Bitcoin.

You can buy original pre-O'Keefe Yap Stones, they come up for auction once every couple years, current price is around $20K (2000BTC) for the nicer ones.  They are a scarce limited resource worldwide for primitive money collectors, because it is now forbidden to export any out of country.  Most of the original exported ones were bought up for display by banks and museums.

Just as a milestone was reached when 1BTC > 1USD, I predict that someday 1BTC will reach parity and exceed the market value of 1 Yap Stone :)

http://stacksbowers.com/auctions/auctionlot.aspx?lotid=297409
http://stacksbowers.com/images/inventory/114/174245_01.jpg

http://coins.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=3010&lotNo=21988
http://images.ha.com/lf?set=path%5B5%2F7%2F5%2F3%2F5753914%5D%2Csizedata%5B220x350%5D&call=url%5Bfile%3Aproduct.chain%5D

Even when you have $1M it will be hard to buy bitcoins worth $1M as you would move the market and not know if it would settle much lower shortly later so your "coin" would not actually be worth $1M or if you ignite the next rally leaving you to ask if it was worth getting $1M in the first place. (Well, it would :) )


I say, think smaller! What if the $1M coin is about the size of a penny? The fact that $3M worth of gold can barely be transported by less than 3 guys with a custom trolley and 15 bodyguards can much better be put in contrast with a dime-sized coin worth the same than with a gold-coated bunch of iron/whatever.

(Disclaimer: I distrust physical bitcoins as much as hosted wallets.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaCOn9uDW6U  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaCOn9uDW6U) this one holds the world record and weighs 1 tonne. Its worth 55 million dollars with a face value of $1 000 000 AUD.

One of the reasons Casascius coins are considered trustworthy by many, is that they are assembled under strict control by one person, Mike Caldwell - whose business, reputation (and perhaps personal safety?!) depend on him not disclosing, leaking or keeping a copy of the key.

Doing this on a massive scale without assistance or being seen, might be tricky!

That Yap stones were hard to move makes me wonder about an analog. If you wanted to make BTCs hard for a community to move you would generate and encrypt the privkey with a random passphrase of crackable size.

So you say, here's the privkey. It's encrypted with a 13 character passphrase including letters, uppercase, numbers, and special characters and it becomes a sort of prize.

Maybe it becomes easier then to move the coins by legal contract rather than by the blockchain.

Or cracking the passphrase becomes a sort of transaction fee on making a transfer noted in the block chain.

Finally, nobody says the encrypted privkey needs to be public. There could be some additional process to gain access to that particular ciphertext.