Hello everyone,

As promised I will now announce the winner of the bitaurum bitnote design competition. Sadly, if you check the first post, you will see that only entries that were sent to me by email could be considered, which disqualifies the designs by psy and acorn although I enjoyed them very much
(The reason for this rule is the irreversibility of email and thereby the lack of 1984-like effects. You can always manipulate externally hosted images on a board and then fight about who did what in reference to what was posted before...)

Back to the story: About one day after announcing the competition, I received a design by BitcoinLady (Mark and Barbara Messer, to my understanding), who obviously had been working on a project like this for some time. They quickly adopted to the requirements and within the last 2 weeks created a 90% finished design that only needs some more refinement. They wished not to be published before the contest is over, so I honoured this wish.

Here it is, the front of the winning design by BitcoinLady:



There are some refinements necessary, such as colour balancing the front and backside, implementing the byte-based denominator (there seemed to be a misunderstanding about it being a base-10-divisor to give Satoshis, milliBTC...), changing the image of John Locke to someone who was pro-paper-money (or at least not completely opposed ), adding some security features (will be made public when the final design is available), ...

If these requirements are filled, I will wholeheartedly pay the 10 BTC as promised. Should there be any problems (which I of course don't expect), I would like the second and third place (2nd: psy; 3rd: acorn) to stand by for about 2 weeks before they publish the designs elsewhere, because I would like the option to commission your work without having to worry about licensing. After this period, I highly recommend making your designs available for the public under a CC license. They are nice to look at and might convince the odd stranger of your talent. All of this is optional for you, of course.

I would like to end by thanking all of the artists that participated. I hope nobody felt like their time was wasted and even thought only one of you could gain the "grand" prize, I hope that everyone has gained a bit of experience. Also, I learned that there is a lot of creative potential within the bitcoin community and I will gladly recommend you guys to any outsider that happens to pass by: It has been fun to be in contact with so many talented people and I know where to look when I have some more designing to do.

It has been a pleasure!

PS: That image of Hofer everyone keeps using is dreadful, I guess he didn't bring the best painters when doing guerilla warfare against the French . Thanks very much to Mr.No who found this sculptor (http://jimsfigs.blogspot.de/2013/03/andreas-hofer-completed.html), some other paintings, as well as tools for exactly the job we try to get done here (http://www.guard-soft.com/strokes_maker.html).

Кириллическая Б? Очень круто, спасибо. Мне к этому моменту даже в голову не приходило что биткоин может быть с кириллической Б.
Непонятная надпись на монете "деньги свободой", наверное должно быть "свободные деньги".
Каскасюс когда-то делал золотые монеты, унция золота + 1000 биткоинов. Стоили они, если не ошибаюсь, около 1600 биткоинов, тогда биткоин был около 5-и.
Сейчас такая монета от Каскасюса должна была бы стоить около 1060-1080.
Но смысла делать такие монеты особого нету. Нужно доверие к эмитенту. Каскасюс сейчас выпускает пустые слитки с двойным подтверждением .
Единственный смысл это как сувенир, или на подарок. Как средство хранения - нет.