Backing up a crypto coin is a bad concept. It totally exposes it to unnecessary dangers of government actions and third party malfeasance.

Exactly. These sorts of things only have value as collectors items and can't really be good as a physical "cash" version of bitcoin.

Valaurum (or my Shire Silver) does work as a physical cash-like thing, but doesn't work online. Bitcoin works fantastic online, but doesn't work offline.

Once you separate bitcoin from online you lose the safety that is provided, just like if you try to make gold into a digital currency you lose the safety of physically holding it. Its all about having actual control over the currency.

Why not just use Shire Silver? ( https://shiresilver.com ) We have the world's smallest physical gold trade unit at 1/20th gram of gold as well as tenth gram, half gram, and tenth dinar (0.425 gram). I put my idea into the public domain so anyone can use my model, and I even have instructions on the site. The cards are credit card sized and fit well in wallets, yet contain the actual gold (or silver if a silver card). No separate backing needed.

Coming soon is also valaurum's plastic notes ( http://www.valaurum.com/ ). I have one in my wallet (we traded products as friendly competitors). They use the same plastic that is used for modern banknotes, but with gold sprayed/printed between the plastic layers. They are calling theirs "aurum" so you might find yourself dealing with trademark issues - they seem more traditional when it comes to business and might get lawyers involved.

That makes absolutely no sense at all. How could someone selling coins on an exchange used by a bunch of people get sent specifically to another person as a payoff? And why would balduro paying BCX off with airdrop funds (which would be easily proven, anyone can check) make BCX admit that the airdrop seems valid?

What is much much more likely to have happened is that BCX ran his attack and through that made a bunch in mining fees. If it worked he should have made far more than that anyway. And then, having proven his point and gotten the dev team to acknowledge that, he was satisfied and has either stopped his attack (already having made some coin) or is no longer pushing it while waiting for the fix to get put in.

I hope BCX tries his attack again once the fix is put in, just to test to make sure the fix actually works. I would love to hear confirmation that the fix really solves the problem.

What this looks like to me is either the trolls and haters have killed it, or by their constant attacks have given Danny the cover he needs to pull off a scam. Either way, this appears to be all the fault of the trolls.

Sure, some of the blame could be placed at the feet of Ukyo, but if it weren't for the trolls it appears that it could have still managed.

And it still could survive, if Danny does actually find someone with some vision and skill to buy and grow it.

Just because you are comfortable with your chains doesn't mean they don't exist.

Also, you might think that 'police state' only means an obvious and overwhelming show of force by police, constantly brutalizing the citizens openly; but you'd be wrong. One way you can tell you're in a police state is if a business can compete by ratting out a competitor to the government.

Exactly, which is why I made Shire Silver, credit card sized units with small amounts of gold and silver in them. They make gold and silver as easy to use as the paper notes, so you don't need the paper in the first place.

But yeah, bitcoin has certainly made a strong case for being the primary digital currency, with physical currency like mine being relegated to physical exchanges.

IMHO one of the most important criteria is what sort of collection system will be used.

With a land tax (and to some extent a more general property tax) the things being taxed are very public and well defined. The taxing authority has a database of the property being taxed and knows who the owners are. It needs these in order to defend the ownership rights in the first place. If someone doesn't pay their taxes, they can be allowed to stay on the property (if it is their domicile) until they die, with a lien being placed on the property.

On the other hand, most other forms of taxation are significantly easier to avoid. This is a bad thing because their ease of evasion leads directly to more invasive enforcement techniques. A sales tax, for example, ends up requiring a virtual police state where business owners become tax collection agents. A business owner who finds out a competitor is not collecting/paying all their taxes can report them, harming their competitors. Tax agents need to be granted the ability to look into everyone's business to ensure no one is avoiding their "fair share". Income taxes are one of the worst in this regard, requiring everyone to open their personal books up to tax collectors.

If your tax system requires a police state, that is pretty bad indeed.

So far the only one I've seen with any value at all is Auroracoin. That one at least has some way to distribute its premine to its intended demographic, and it appears to be doing so reasonably well. It can either end up acting like a local currency or it might act as a way to get a bunch of folks using bitcoin. Either way is a win.

I have no idea how the others can even attempt to fairly distribute their coins. Its not like their governments are going to give the developers access to their citizen databases to allow them to verify the airdrops.

Nice! I worked for Digital River many years ago. First place I worked that had Beer Fridays.

My favorite story from working there:

They had a sort of war room in the center of the building. Two doors, no windows. The walls were covered with whiteboard. The whiteboard walls were covered with the system documentation, including the only copies of certain master codes. Yep, the "keys to the kingdom" were stored only on the whiteboard.

So the boss left for vacation. Boy did he get a surprise when he returned. We had cleaned all the whiteboards so they were shiny clean! 

Of course we had taken hi-res photos of all the boards before cleaning them, and put them on a server.

Here's some slightly embarrassing fun from 5 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA584XBkP0s You can even use something like this with a sledgehammer. But its a damn pain and very slow to do it this way.

Gave up on the idea of small scale minting, and created the Shire Silver card model. Much better, IMHO.

I do like the comparison of holding the physical metal being equivalent to controlling the private keys of bitcoin addresses vs fiat currencies being like holding paper gold.

If you are interested in precious metals intended for use in trade, instead of investment or simple value holding, check us out. http://shiresilver.com We make small denomination units that fit in your physical wallet.

Yes, the sealed containers are one way to go. They don't have denominations as small as I do, and they are significantly thicker. Some of them don't seem like they would handle the wear and tear of everyday wallet usage though, so I don't recommend it.

My cards are meant for use in typical everyday transactions, such as buying a cup of coffee to getting groceries.


Shire Silver is a direct response to the arrest of my friend Bernard. I started working on it two days after he was arrested. It became obvious that there needed to be a way to make money that could be decentralized in its production and distribution so there would be no headquarters to attack.

I got involved with the Liberty Dollar in 1999. Since then, with all the precious metal transactions I have seen, and being an early mover to the Free State I have seen a lot, I have only seen one person actually bother to weigh any. He was weighing junk silver as he accepted it, and accepting it for the exact spot value of each coin's silver weight. Most people just accept silver coins with a cursory look over. After all, its really not worth their time to put much effort into looking for counterfeits for a $2 transaction. IMHO the brand acceptance is far more important than any time consuming testing individuals can do.


Agreed. It did take me longer than I'd like to come around to accepting bitcoin. But I also still don't see it as fulfilling all possible monetary uses. There is still a place for physical sound money - that's where Shire Silver comes in.

Branding. People trust government's currency in large part because it has the government's branding. The market can figure out which brands are trustworthy and which ones aren't.

Plus, with the small denominations much of the cost is in the manufacturing. Replacing the precious metal with faked metal wouldn't create much profit. You'd have to mass produce them on a large scale for it to be worth your time, and if someone can do that why not just do it legitimately? You'd be much safer and likely to make more in the middle to long term. To put it another way, it would take too much effort to do a pump-n-dump to be worth it.


Yes, I do advocate the return to the days when people took responsibility for themselves. And yes, it does point out that the bitcoin protocol does make accepting that responsibility much easier, at least for technically inclined folks. But the cases like Mt Gox do show that people still need to be aware of how the system really works, in that if you don't control the private keys you don't control the bitcoins.

Also, to use your prospecting example, people didn't just accept nuggets by weight. Gold dust was easy enough to accept by weight because the pieces were so small that counterfeiting them was (at the time) essentially impossible. Gold dust was also probably discounted somewhat based on the risk the merchant thought he was taking. Larger nuggets would be assayed before being accepted.

I'm starting to wonder how long it'll be before we see a Racial Purity Coin, where you get a percentage of the premine based on your skin color. To make it really work though they'd need to scan your DNA and keep it in a database so they know you aren't trying to get more than your fair share. 

LOL, I'm the guy in the video, and using a silly straw helps me to make them inexpensively. In fact, anyone can make their own - that's one of the points of it. That allows its production to be more decentralized, as in anyone can start their own version for their area. Instructions are on the site. I've called it the drug dealer model of production and distribution in that if enough people are doing it then there's no point going after them since you'd never stop it.

And just like with bitcoin, the merchant network is really what makes it valuable. Its just that with bitcoin it has an inherent virality and ease of Internet use that makes getting lots of web based merchants on board, whereas Shire Silver is physical and needs locals promoting it. If I had a tenth as many people half as devoted to Shire Silver as bitcoin has, there'd probably be hundreds of places near you accepting it.

The solution is obvious: https://shiresilver.com/catalog/gold_twentieth_gram_card 

I'm in the "gold and bitcoin complement each other" crowd, and I'm also thinking that we are actually in the collapse. I don't think the collapse is a singularity type event, but a slow reorganization of the economy similar to the change from an agrarian to an industrial economy.

I love bitcoin for online and in person digital transactions, but its not so good for in person anonymous cash-like transactions. Gold and silver, especially in my favorite form of Shire Silver (https://shiresilver.com), is great for in person anonymous transactions but sucks for online and digital.

I'm also wishing people would stop trying to make physical bitcoins intended for use in trade - they can never properly handle the trust issue. They might be great for interesting cold storage, but as trade pieces they fail. To be more clear, physical gold and silver can be trusted for in person exchanges, but not for online. Bitcoin can be trusted for online, but not physical exchanges.

PM sent.
See also https://github.com/rhelwig/coinsweep/tree/master/coinsweep/coinsweeper (which I haven't worked on past my own personal needs, but if anyone wants to fund more development let me know).