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Just curious if there's any good way to sell Casascius coins these days. I've seen a few sold at auction houses. A few years back there used to be a website for someone acting as a broker/cosigner, but I don't remember what the website was called and can't seem to find it anymore. Seems there's at least one loaded one listed on eBay right now, but I know they're generally cancelled on that platform. Any other ideas?
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Impressive effort you put on that. Imagine if you would have put that much effort in mining coins at that time. Hopefully you did by the way. Royse777 - yes, you would have to trust me to use the address, that's a given. Similar to early Casascius coins, I suppose. Could still be used to sign messages if you didn't want to send any BTC to the address!
Signing a message is all what I see the use of it other than that there are not any (much) use. I did lots of mining back in the day, yes! Also had a lot more free time than I do now... |
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Alright, story time!
I was hired to develop the firstbits website and generate addresses to potentially sell in the future. The sale of the addresses would help support hosting the site, and would hopefully provide extra profit beyond that. The website was created and we spent quite a lot of time putting together a dictionary of English words + names to search for. I put together a computer and ran 6 or 7 batches of them over a few days/weeks using a python script, saving any addresses that matched the criteria and sending a satoshi to eat to "claim" those firstbits before anyone else. Initially, I had sent 0.1 BTC to each and then recovered it back to a different address (that was interesting, to have to generate a transaction from an air-gapped machine!). Decided later on it was simpler to send a satoshi to each address and leave it there.
However, there was a lot of criticism for the firstbits idea, for good reason. Definitely some benefits, but big dangers as well, chief of which (in my mind) was the webserver getting hacked and the database or website being changed. As the blockchain exploded in size, the database became a bit unwieldy and I wasn't much of a data guy back then so rather than invest a bunch of time in the issues, we turned off the website. I still have the domain.
Royse777 - yes, you would have to trust me to use the address, that's a given. Similar to early Casascius coins, I suppose. Could still be used to sign messages if you didn't want to send any BTC to the address!
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I've got a ton of Bitcoin "firstbits" addresses that were generated (and written to the blockchain via transactions) back in the day... 2011-ish. Is there any interest in those? Thought there might be some interest as a sort of novelty to have, a digital collectible.
They've been kept on air-gapped storage, never seen network or internet access, and would remain that way (securely deleted as sold). I generated them and have been the sole owner of them this whole time - no one else has touched them.
Some random examples include:
1MunCh - 1MunCh1kFAwisrTySvZvyxsXkrEeFCMehH
1BLing - 1BLingJstkxW53nsjNbDe7zFUJ5P42KuJC
1DiRty - 1DiRty8t4qJhCmp5QL2BqThdHLcAgHTDeb
1MaRTiN - 1MaRTiNSNqawwV3iGCakD2AA4Jj8m9TQvL
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Updated with sold coins. Only have two left now...!
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Someone should make a google forms and track this accurately. let people enter it in and attach a username or name.
Sounds like you just volunteered! |
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No nothing was published. Grades just went up overnight...
Interesting that people were able to figure out what the difference was from then. |
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Hey there, Just checking to see if any of your coins are available. Thanks  Hi Tommy, I'm about 6 months late, but yes, they are still available. Amazing how ANACS sorta screwed us... After seeing you post graded coins I figured out the forms and started getting some graded also. I am sure you already know you could regrade all of those coins and likely get MS-67+... Had no idea actually, that's terrible. Thanks for letting me know though. Yep.. About 1.5 years back MS-67 was the top grade a Casascius Silver would get...period. Then all of the sudden ANACS started handing out 68/69 and very rarely 70. I have personally resubmitted 50+ coins that were "older" grades and every single one went up 1-3 grades. I will say MS-70 is still very rare so at least they are not just handing that grade out often. Didn't this shift in grades have something to do with ANACS changing their criteria to no longer consider the sticker/holo as part of the coin? As in originally they would apply grading rules to the assembly as a whole (both the metal and the holo), but now they ignore the holo and only "grade" the metal portion. Justification being that the metal is the actual coin or token, the sticker is merely an application. That's interesting. Makes sense why the grades would go up in that case. Is there anything published regarding that change? |
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The serial number on the back of the coins give some indication of how early or late the coins were graded.
I have some from the first months as well, and have elected to keep them in there or original grading, especially as the community has begun to understood that all grades are not created equal in the world of casascius.
Some good looking coins in there, good luck on your sales!
I think one or two of mine are still from the very first time anyone graded them (I was the first to send any in to ANACS) so I think that's kind of special. Will probably want to keep those ones in the original cases at least. EDIT: I guess it's just one - I had already listed that as a feature of the coin! |
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Hey there, Just checking to see if any of your coins are available. Thanks Hi Tommy, I'm about 6 months late, but yes, they are still available. Amazing how ANACS sorta screwed us... After seeing you post graded coins I figured out the forms and started getting some graded also. I am sure you already know you could regrade all of those coins and likely get MS-67+... Had no idea actually, that's terrible. Thanks for letting me know though. |
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Hey there, Just checking to see if any of your coins are available. Thanks Hi Tommy, I'm about 6 months late, but yes, they are still available. |
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Just wanted to mention that I bought a code today and it validated, so far everything's hunky-dory. Cheers watusi_eyez.
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Just curious - how do you all think the market is for physical coins these days? I still have a few left, but am unsure if this is a bad time to sell because I haven't been keeping up on it much.
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Can you give an idea of price range you are willing to pay? $100? $1000? $10000?
I am sure that no GE account costs that much. Yeah I mean, I really have no idea how much they're worth, so that's why I'm asking for some sort of range. |
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bitcoin.guruLooking for $1000+, send me your offer. It currently has a small blog with minimal incoming traffic from web searches, but the value is mostly in the domain name. You get both.
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Can you give an idea of price range you are willing to pay? $100? $1000? $10000?
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Would just like to mention, my coins are still up for sale!  |
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That 1% is a lot in my opinion, taking into consideration this is just a corner of the glacier, I guess there maybe in total 5% lost..
I wouldn't be surprised if it is more like 2M BTC lost. In the first year+ of Bitcoin's existence (during which almost 2M coins were mined) it was nothing more than an interesting experiment. The coins were worthless, and people treated them as such. I mean heck, the first known monetary valuation wasn't until Lazlo's pizza, which was mid-2010, 1 and a half years after it started. Not to mention than Satoshi himself mined a good 1M BTC, and I don't expect those will ever move. Just my best guess on it. I'd be willing to bet that 10 years from now, there will be at least 2M coins that haven't moved between now and then. I believe that bitcoin was actually trading on gox prior to Lazio's pizza purchase; this transaction was only the first known transaction that both involved bitcion and actual goods/services. I do agree with that that in Bitcoin's early days, many people likely treated their private keys with little care. I would not however underestimate the potential for technology to be able to recover data once it has been seen by either the human eye and/or has previously been stored on a hard drive If you do a forum search for "mtgox" with a message age between 1640 days (how many days it has been since laszlo's first post) and 9999 days, only one post comes up, and that's only because it was edited a year later. So no, I do not believe MtGox was trading before laszlo's post. Surely there would be announcements and chat about it on the forum if it was. |
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I have one silver+gold graded MS-67... how much are you looking to pay?
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