Bitcoin Forum

Before you read below, let me tell you that this is not my area of expertise & I don't know much about the technical aspects of BTC. I'm more interested in the economic side. But, I was doing some research on bills & couldn't find anything interesting.

If this has technical issues or if I'm wrong in a newbie way, you where adviced. Or even worse, maybe this has already being created & im just repeating. I don't know.

Ok so, after thinking for a while, I had an idea in which everyone, specially people who know absolutely nothing about BTC can hold it physically as a bill. And transact it without verifying the funds. At the same time, if the user wants to transform this physical BTC into digital form he also is able to do so.

¿So how those this logic work?

The only way to do this, is by hidding the private key inside the bill in such a way that you must destroy the bill to get digital acces to the funds. Otherwise it can continue circulating physically as a valid store of value & as a medium of exchange.

This piece of paper would show only two things:

1) A QR to verify founds.
2) The value of the bill in sats or btc.

In case someone has bad intentions & wants to repair the bill, so he can continue to use it without funds. Then as it was destroyed, the aspect of the bill would have an estrange look to it. This would lead to suspicion & by consequence the receiver would check the funds by scanning the QR code. Detecting it as fraudulent.

The only weak point I see in this idea is that the verify QR could not be the same as the private key with access to the funds. So, the only way I think it could be manufactured, is by a trust mechanism.

A topic from a decade ago by none other than Gavin Andresen that discusses about physical bitcoin - Printing bitcoins : could it work? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737.msg7990#msg7990)

There are also plenty of topics about Bitbills here
Bitbill Patent Published - Encompasses Physical Bitcoins and Paper Wallets (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=247364)

I am not sure whether this idea is really good or not. But it seems to me it is a step backward to be honest. Just when the world is doing away with notes and physical versions of fiat currencies, you have here pushing it forward as if it is the better way to use something which is the perfect currency to match a digital future. We have started to enter into a cashless society.

Thanks for the links.

Gavin talks about a bill which doesn't force people to destroy it if they want to move the funds digitally. & this is a problem because the piece of paper can keep moving with no funds in it.

This idea solves that problem. By giving the user two choices:

1) They can continue to transact or save the piece of paper without the need of verifying it or knowing how BTC works.

or

2) They can desrtoy it to get the private key & move the funds into a digital form.

The main idea here is that value is validated by the integrity and physical condition of the bill. And so, you can have different bill values to solve the change problem.

Cash is really good. It gives freedom. You don't need technology or wifi acces to validate.

I live in the farm & the majority don't use technology or credit cards. They only use cash. Is easy and practical.

The cool thing about this idea, is that the paper is the settlement. It can't be printed at the will of a government or a centralized institution. It would have the same atributes, but allowing people to transact it as physical cash.

It doesn't need an institution to validate it. You can validate it by scanning the QR or getting the private key by destroying the bill. There are no third parties involved.

The only problem here is how to create the trust mechanism to manufacture it. So people are confident that the QR code displayed in the bill is the one associated with the private key inside the bill.

And now, we have successfully created totally unnecessary problems because of this.

How about we just stick to Bitcoin as a digital currency or an Electronic Cash System as defined by Satoshi himself? :)


At this point, I think cash still has a valuable role to play. We have way more to go as a digital world. As a matter of fact, there are still people who do not know how to use the very rudimentary versions of cellphones. But it does not mean that the future technologies will be the ones to stoop down and adjust to the old way of living. The old way of living is the one that has to do the catching up.

If someone is living with the barest of technologies, he/she better be using the existing fiat currency rather than get involved in a digital currency turned into a bill. That's just a hassle to him/her. If one does not even have a credit card, a smart phone, and a wifi access, I doubt if he/she has the capacity to validate whether a Bitcoin bill is legit or has balance or not.

Also, a bill that has to be destroyed every time it is used up will cost more to our mother nature than our existing fiat bills which could last up to a few years in usage.

This is same idea as Physical coin like Casascius and Bitbills that hiding the private key under the hologram sticker intact in the coin/paper bills.

Refer here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2022902.0

Why will people be interested in physical BTC bills whiles the world is gradually moving into a digital village?  There is no way this idea is gonna make and improve the usage of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.  We just have to accept Bitcoin as the way it is and how it operates...

ideas like this will always introduce a lot of centralization and nobody who uses bitcoin wants that. for example to print a physical bitcoin bill you'll need a centralized entity to create them in a fraud proof way, that is like government and banks printing fiat money right now and that is exactly what we were trying to avoid by using bitcoin. in other words if you want to use bills and are ok with centralization then use fiat instead of bitcoin. it is a lot safer that way.

But this idea was really good in which it would be more accessible in which you just need to scan a QR code in order to make a payment using bitcoin or even altcoins as well the main problem was before it to be more accessible we need to be centralized in order to make a print QR code and like what you have been said it is really in need to avoid fraud that may happens anytime if the payment through bitcoin was not established very well and it will be a big problem if that happens.

I like the idea of having possible ways for bitcoin to be seen by people merely for adoption, but would it be like going back to the past where we use fiats and taking digitalization of money away? Though, what it will do is to make our money really legitimate and secured, we could possible have cards that is in size of ATM cards where we could store bitcoins in it. If I am not mistaken, these are called cold wallets. And for example, we already have company that uses it and that is coldkey.

With the physical ones you could do one thing .
Paper wallets
This can inturn help everyone without anything else to be added to the list , paper wallets can be used as physical bills after the reciever confirms the amount.
Physical bills doesn't necessarily mean that we have to actually get something like the normal currency or the dollar.

As Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto currency it cannot be printed that is not that easy and nobody wants it. In this digital world its a digital currency let it be the way it is. It cannot be a centralized bitcoin and know one wants it. Already cash system is there in practical if we want we can use it for our daily needs. Decentralized cryptocurrency can be done to use online shopping, payment mode etc. Government will not support bitcoin to be a cash.

The fact I can use BTC to pay bills now is more than enough for me, that I don't aim to have physical coin or paper for paying but simply as a collection like those casascius coins. It will depend on our country, what app or wallet we use, I can pay via my crypto wallet my bills directly or via QR Code when in some shop.

Why do you think need creat bill, sound like physical bitcoin and centralization. Bitcoin has been created for decentralized financial economy without printing physical money. Now if you are wondering printing something like physical bill then it will hit decentralized system. Also it would prevent financial freedom, and of course we need third party for implement something like that. I don't like to see physical bill instead of p2p electronic system. Current bitcoin uses system is fine for me. We just need increse physical use of bitcoin like buy goods etc.

The keyword is JUST!

Now I would have to pay a guy 18.4 mbtc, let's say and I have 2 mbtc bills.
He will have to scan 10 bills and then I will have to scan back one mbtc bill and 6 0.1 mbtc coins!
And let's say that a few bills will get a bit damaged and you will need to scan it twice or thrice or even refuse the bill because the code is unreadable...

During the Christmas shopping spree I had the bad luck of placing myself in line after a guy who paid for his shopping with 10 and 5 euro bills, now imagine doing the scanning for a client 100 times?
Would that be "just" a scan?

Who do you think will start doing this?
And if you don't put in a place a system where the banknotes are destroyed or emptied, counterfeits will pop up all over the place since you can have 100 bills pointing to the same funded address at the same time. But at the same time, doing something that would render such counterfiets obsolete would cost a lot more than the sum on those bills.

Nope, not going to happen.
As collectibles? Yeah, they already found a niche there but as RL daily usage, no!

To be honest, I don't think that it will be a good idea as we all know that bitcoin's feature is the online transactions only and to not make anything looking physical, to be more specific, getting bitcoin physically in your hands as a physical BTC bill while you're trying to pay something is a pain in the ass, I'd rather pay directly with my smart phone or my laptop which it's a way much easier, secure and safer I guess.

Plus, I think it seems like a step backward in this new technology as you're forced the world to keep using physical coins, which now the trend is only looking for online transactions in a secure and faster way.

There already is opendime which achieves exactly that, though it's a small device rather than just a piece of paper. Anyway, there are some fundamental problems - the security is only as good as the device itself - and with big enough incentive eventually someone finds a way to tamper with this device and steal a lot of money from users. Next, you need Internet to check that the device indeed holds coins - so what's the point of physical Bitcoin then? And lastly, you need to trust the manufacturer that they don't install some backdoor to steal coins from their devices.

Correct us if we are wrong, but this would require one-use wallet. Is there any way to create a single-use wallet which is one way only(out)? What if someone would send BTC to such non-existent address (already emptied)?

Although your idea doesn't mean that bitcoin being physical currency as a normal currency, what is the difference between that if it both involves money. I think that we're forgetting why bitcoin existed. It is a digital currency not an another tangible thingy currency. It was used in faster transactions and exchange through blockchain technology and making it a paper currency isn't necessary at all. People used to hold bitcoin in their bank accounts and wallet accounts. We don't need bitcoin to become a paper, we need bitcoin to increase its price and making it a paper doesn't have any effect in doing it as a physical bills.

You even admitted you know very little about the "technical aspects" of bitcoin. The "technical" aspects is exactly what bitcoin is so I am unsure what exactly is left behind to understand?
If you educated yourself before making this topic you would not have made it. How can you talk about something you do little research in? You don't make sense.
Physical? In a digital world? Do you want to go backwards? Why not just use fiat then? The point of bitcoin is that is is digital.

Btw this is why it won't work. Bill are printed by the government and each bill is unique and has various methods to prove it is real. A bitcoin bill is printed by anyone with a printer. How can you pay someone with something you just printed out? I could hand you a piece of paper with the QE code to a game on the android market and just tell you it has $100 on it to pay for my purchase? How will you know how much is on it? There is no way to verify it. Why not just display a QR one your phone and let the other person scan that directly?

I am also of the same opinion instead of involving your head in such matters, focus on the physical use of Bitcoin worldwide. It is not widely acceptable in small stores, shopping centers, cafes etc. at one side people are using it for even paying for their packet of peanuts on the other sides it is not even accepted in big shopping places. We should work on its promotion everywhere on the same scale. Our major focus should be placed on underdeveloped countries where it is not known by the local people.

Let me adress this questions.

¿Physical?
All the digital world has a physical interface.

¿Do you want to go backwards?
No. Forward. Of course.

¿Why not just use fiat then?
Because fiat is not standard to sound money.

"The point of bitcoin is that is is digital"
It is not. The point of bitcoin is that it's the best sound money ever created due to all it atributes (scarce, descentrelized, no point of failure, secure, permissionless, etc)

How will you know how much is on it? There is no way to verify it. Why not just display a QR one your phone and let the other person scan that directly?

This is why at the end of my first post I said that it would be a challenge to create this trust mechanism. Which I have no idea, at how it could be implemented.. yet..

your idea is too complicated.
I have already paid electricity bills with bitcoin that I have, I only check bills and pay using bitcoin to my electricity bill address, after confirming 1 block, my electricity bill payment transaction was successful.

Bitcoin payment method is very good option if it is accepted as a method where you pay your bills. Not only for paying bills it is very successful for other payments also. People share their multiple experiences of its usage getting wide with the time. As a man from California said, I paid my peanut packet bill by using Bitcoin and from the other shop I paid my coffee bill by using this as a method of payment.

I think this is a great idea that should help to spread crypto furthermore.
We're in a time where govt don't see crypto as negatively as it was the case back then.
There is still a huge learning curve in order to be able to transact with cryptocurrencies.
I want to take that entry-barrier down so anyone who wants to join the party without any IT knowledge can easily hold onto crypto.

Yes, bitcoin is intended to be sent in a transaction that gets broadcasted, then included in a block etc...
However, it is not impossible to exchange BTC among us by exchanging the private keys where the coins belong to.

I've been working for about a year on such a concept and I'm proud to come up with a solution for this.
The name of my product is "Coldkey".

Our most desirable release is the "History" serie. You can check it out here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5193561
To keep it short, it is a monthly release that is loaded with the BTC equivalent of €50, at the rate of the 1st day in the month.
The artwork evolves every quarter for now, and it features a renowned artist in the cryptocurrency sphere.

I've developed anti-counterfeiting mechanisms on the physical cards themselves; the funding can also be checked in Blockchain explorers.

There is a lot to do around this principle.
Somehow I foresee "cryptographic trust institutions" coming to existence.
If the Coldkey is intact, then it's as good as crypto.
If it is redeemed, then the secret to spend the BTC has been accessed and the Coldkey is not as good as crypto anymore.

Thanks for the acknowledgment.

What a cool product you are developing. Congratulations.

It would be cool to see a coldkey showing a peaceful warrior (BTC) slowly destroying the power & control of the obscure elite.

This cold key could become something similar to baseball cards or magic cards. Which some have incredible value.

If you could mix it with signatures of recognized people in the space it would be awesome.