tl;dr - How do you secure the private key on publicly sold paper wallets (coins, cards, bills etc)?

Since there are a lot of smart people on these forums I figured I would bring this up here and see if anyone can come up with a solution to what I think would change the security of Bitcoin in a big way.

I am a huge fan of paper wallets. So much that I store all my Bitcoin on paper.. When I go out to eat I even tip the waiter/waitress in Bitcoin by pre printing out some piper paper wallets and leaving one as a tip with a note on how to use it.

Over the years I have watched people sell Bitcoin cards with holograms, Bitcoin bearer bonds, Bitcoin paper money etc and have seen these same wallets have the funds stolen from them because the creator knew the private key. There are close to 60,000 BTC in unopened Casascius coins out there. I know I would lose a bit of sleep knowing at if this 7 million in value turned into 700 million and someone decided to claim the coins because they had the private keys backed up somewhere.

What I would like to create is a Bitcoin card that you can buy with absolute confidence that only you know the private key. Then anyone can put Bitcoin in cold storage without any fear of it being hacked.

Imagine being able to buy an empty Bitcoin card and push any amount of Bitcoin to it and know with 100% certainty that this Bitcoin is secure as long as Bitcoin is (ie: proper random number generation, only inbound transactions etc, no brain wallet keys etc). Then you just send BTC to this address and watch it on the blockchain without ever losing any sleep.

To pull this off though there needs to be a way to put the private key on the card without actually having an opportunity for an employee or manufacturer or anyone for that matter to see it without breaking the tamper mechanism. Even more importantly that the end user knows that his key is secure and known only by him and that the key will actually work when he goes to access it.

One idea that might work would be a multi signature approach where you need both the private key on the card and the private key that you generate online to access the BTC then the creator can't steal the BTC.

Cross post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=234614.0

No longer for sale.

[UPDATE 6/9/2013:Thanks again to everyone who reached out to me. I ended up picking up 17 Avalon units in total - 71 GH/s each (1.2 TH/s of total mining power) and still have well over half to invest in other stuff. We physically picked these up most of these to avoid any risks.I am still interested in your units if the price is really good though more interested in ASIC companies that can deliver. My partner and I are looking to deploy about $250,000 USD per week over the next several months so please reach out if you can deliver and when and what it would take to get first batch delivery.]

UPDATE 6/9/2013:

Thanks again to everyone who reached out to me. I ended up picking up 17 Avalon units in total - 71 GH/s each  (1.2 TH/s of total mining power) and still have well over half to invest in other stuff.  We physically picked these up most of these to avoid any risks.

I am still interested in your units if the price is really good though more interested in ASIC companies that can deliver. My partner and I are looking to deploy about $250,000 USD per week over the next several months so please reach out if you can deliver and when and what it would take to get first batch delivery.


I am looking to buy hardware in hand (not pre-order) a good example would be today I am paying $XX USD for three module Avalon ASIC unit (68 to 72 GH/s). I feel these are a bit overpriced and with the difficulty going up so fast I won't buy to many at this price but am buying some now.

I am hoping  for a Chinese company that makes ASIC units wants a quick million USD for hardware they have in hand that they are most likely mining with now and don't want to risk the difficulty raises or upcoming ASIC onslaught but will also buy small single unit orders.

I prefer to buy in the USA for small orders but if its a big order (over 250k) I will fly to your country. I have done a lot of business in China and even lived there a while so I have no problem going to the PRC either. So if you are a Chinese supplier and can deliver now even better.

Payment: Will be done via USD wire transfer not BTC. There are several reasons for this:
- Its harder than you think for a US citizen to convert a million dollars into BTC
- Due to current laws I don't have a lot of legal recourse if I pay with Bitcoin vs a national currency.
- For tax purposes its a lot easier to write off a million dollar hardware charge than a million dollar Bitcoin charge.

History: I have done a few buys on the forums: 100 Lancelot units from Black Arrow, 80 USB Block Erupters, and one Avalon batch 3 pre-order paid in full for 14k. The block erupters scale decently well using Raspberry PIs see my post here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137934.msg2345214#msg2345214 though are to expensive and I am looking for more scale.

I also wanted to point out I did this trade here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209471.msg2242450#msg2242450

Apart from this I used to sell virtual currency as far back as 1997 with games like Ultima Online, Everquest and World of Warcraft. At one point were were doing over 10 million USD in sales a month before I got out of the space so am no stranger to virtual currencies. More info on Google since its not really related to this post.

You can PM me, email me at yantis@yantis.net or skype me at jonyantis or via wechat : yantis