Not to self-aggrandize here, but we have a ton of feedback that tells us that owning a lovely physical bitcoin gets people excited about the future of bitcoin more than most things. 

I give them away as gifts to people that were previously unacquainted with bitcoin and they often come back with questions and new ideas for bitcoin related businesses.

If you need bitcoin evangelism tools, we're makin' 'em. 

I love that you mentioned "Flappy Bird" as the first and most prominent example of troubled genius.

We get most of what we need from bitcoinwisdom.com.

bitcoincharts.com is good for tracking disparity between markets, but it doesn't seem to update as fast as bitcoinwisdom.com. 

Good question.   

No.  The point of the video survellance is to track who was present in the assembly room and when.  The info is already recorded with each production batch, so its a secondary verification.  There's an enough resolution to do the job, but not nearly enough to read the text from the private keys. 

We don't sell unloaded coins at the moment, though you should be able to find some on ebay/craigslist/ classifieds from owners that have redeemed the coins.  Only a handful of silver coins have been redeemed, but we have seen them for sale out there.   

We're planning on releasing self-funded coins later in 2014, using a multi-signature address and private key system.

We've got the 1 oz. Gold coins now.  Unfortunately, we're having to do smaller runs than we originally thought and the first ones were sold out before we even got the blanks in our shop.  The refinery doing these for us is pretty slow (it took 4 months to get the tooling ready) so if you'd like to reserve one of the Gold coins from the next batch, email sales@titanbtc.com or PM me ASAP. 

Until we can speed up production of our 1 oz. Gold blanks, delivery will take about 4 weeks, depending on where you live.  I expect we'll have this supply crunch resolved by the end of March.  I wish we could speed things up, but they're worth the wait.

From our experience, most states are focused on two things:

1.) Making sure they comply with federal guidelines for MSB regulation.  

2.) Collecting sales and income tax.

The state's don't really seem hungry to start labeling traditional businesses as money transmitters, just because they accept bitcoin.  We (Titan Mint) are in a grey area so our case is a bit unique, but I don't think you need to worry about states regulating pizza shops unless they are running secondary bitcoin exchanges on the side (that clearly operate outside the normal activities of their primary business).

New York is a bit of an anomaly in their regulatory interest.  Perhaps the fact that the state is the home-base for much of the financial industry might have something to do with that?

Well said.


 

No problem.

As for Projects...I hope you nail him to the wall.

Ouch...

Thanks for being so forthright about the issue Jamie.

PM me and I'll send you one of our Titan Bitcoins as a consolation.  I hate to hear about people getting burned with anything related to physical bitcoins.

I'm with you, Mike.  The evidence that they claim to have indicates that Charlie knew what he was doing and allowed his own personal pro-drug bias to influence his business decisions. 

Thanks J,

We started offering both private key and 2-factor authentication for Titan bitcoins at about coin number 200 in the edition for the Titan One.  That is an option for all of our coins.  

The Titan One Silver for 2013, minted in 1 oz of silver, is a separate edition and only 1,000 were produced.  We will sell these until Springtime before moving on to the 2014 edition.

The Titan One Gold, minted in 1 oz of gold, is available late January of 2014.  We're making those in batches of 100 and we're producing no more than 1000 for 2014.  

We're also offering 0.1 BTC, 0.25 BTC, 0.5 BTC, 5 BTC, and 10 BTC this year.  


Also, we did NOT sell 10,000 1 BTC coins in 2013.  I haven't added them up yet, but we'll be publishing the final mintage on our site.

That's high praise coming from a discerning gentleman such as yourself, Cypher.

Quick apology to our Non-American buyers that are wanting to use credit cards.  We've had to enable a more strict card verification system and I'm afraid many overseas customers will have their cards declined as a result.

We can all thank the scammers in France for this one.  I hope they read this, because THEY'RE the reason we can't have nice things.  

If you really want/need to pay with a credit card and are willing to do a little more identity confirmation, email sales@titanbtc.com.  After jumping through a few hoops, we can key in your card manually.  

carry on.

Great question.  We recently added a much needed update to the security page on our website with a bit more detail about that very issue. 

https://www.titanbtc.com/titan-bitcoin-security/

I'm summarizing it here, but basically we're as paranoid as Mike is about the handling of those keys.  We print private keys in batches of a few hundred, on demand as the coins are manufactured. They go straight from the printer to being placed underneath the holograms and they're printed and assembled in a room that's access controlled and under video surveillance. 

The computers and printers that print the codes are permanently offline.  Hard drives are securely wiped after each printing (we usually do batches of private key coins 2-3 times a week) and we follow a procedure for clearing the memory on the printers as well. 

With that said, we're working towards implementing a more automated 2-of-3 key system for the coins that should address some of the security concerns with having a third-party like us handling private keys. 


For our 2-factor authenticated coins, we handle cold storage on our customers' behalf and we DO have access to the private keys for those coins.  IN return for that trust that owners place in us, we are able to verify a coins authenticity and identify counterfeit coins when they are scanned as well as provide extra services.  For example, one customer lost his coin in a movie theater.  The "new owner" contacted us to see about registering the coin.  Long story short, we were able to reunite the coin with its rightful owner.   

Anyway, we're trying to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of bitcoin users with different concerns and requirements.  If we're leaving anyone out, I'm happy to look into how we can adapt to serve this community.  I was an early bitcoin evangelist and this business is an extension of that drive.


 

Glad you like it, Luke!

Thanks BigBitz!

We've had a handful of coins either lost or stolen in the mail so yours definitely wasn't the first.  (South America seems to have an especially high difficulty with delivering mail).  Anyway, that's why we ship the coins unfunded, so that when they don't turn up we can send out a replacement with no questions asked.

Bump for bittorrent sync. I've been very happy with it as well.

It's not cloud storage but as long as you keep one of your computers running, it does exactly the same thing as dropbox only...

- its free
- its faster
- it allows more control over syncing
- it allows for the use of secure keys for sharing files 

There's also a potentially significant security benefit to Bittorrent Sync, because you're the only one with a copy of the files.  That's a big deal if you don't like the NSA requisitioning dropbox for your data.  There's a caveat though, in that its not open source yet. Such as it is, we're still encrypting sensitive data before it gets synced, but BTsync is a big step in the right direction.