Why isn't it possible for Mike caldwell to mint bitcoins with an empty key?

[notig]

Isn't it possible for mike caldwell to mint bitcoins exactly as he did before but instead of payment for them in the amount of the coin plus his service fee.... to just be the service fee and then the customer can load their own private key with their coins? This means that he would not even be moving money around. all he would be doing is accepting some bitcoin for the service.

Customer wants a cassacius coin
Mike makes the coin like he does now with a hologram and everything
Mike charges .05 bitcoins or something for the coin
mike sends the coin to the customer
the customer loads their own bitcoin on to the key using a public key of the private key
the public key would be somewhere on the outside of the coin and it's amount would be easily verifiable
the coin is still tradable to someone else since the private key was never exposed still under the hologram seal

[Anon136]

yea that is my understanding. they were considering him a money transmitter because he was sending bitcoins through the mail. all he has to do is stop funding the public keys and hes not a money transmitter, even by their insane standards.

[notig]

It does seem insane that they would come at him for this. It's almost like they don't even understand what bitcoin is. With the power of cryptography and private and public keys you can easily make it crystal clear that you are not in any way transmitting money by letting the customer themselves load the keys. The only downside I can really see is that someone might take their coin and try to tamper with the public key on the outside to make it different and then try to trade the coin to someone else..... who is looking at a forged public key for a verification on the proper loading of the coin. I'm not sure if you can make the public key on the outside tamper proof........... BUT........ if you can't then mike could keep records of his coins public keys and some kind of serial number. So if someone ever doubted the legitimacy of the public key on the outside of the coin they could check with him and see if it is legit? it would be okay to keep logs of public keys.

[empoweoqwj]

I can see this as yet another great business idea being driven offshore by the draconian financial restrictions in the States.