I assume this has been discussed a lot, I just can't find any good threads via search or google site:bitcointalk.org. If anybody could point me towards some, that would be good.
Now that coins have been circulating for quite a while, it would seem there are two risk vectors buying coins.
1) The coin creation was compromised. Either the creator could have deliberately kept the private key, or an employee somewhere involved in the manufacturing could have. This seems pretty unlikely to me for any of the main physical coins, they are all linked to crypto OG's with reputations, and if it were to happen, it probably would have by now.
2) A buyer of second hand coins works out how to compromise the hologram. This could be pretty profitable. It's also almost impossible to guard against, as the creator of the coins has to think of all possible unique attacks, while the attacker only has to think one. Or wait for technology to improve enough. And once you have one, you can slowly buy and sell your way through every coin that comes up for sale.
The only true way to guard against this to buy coins with provenance. Is there some kind of database of coin addresses that have sold through here? Ie if I know who owned it and for how long, that coin becomes worth more that a coin a newbie says they bought in 2012 and just found in their shoebox? The best way would be through slabbed coins that were slabbed before bitcoin was really worth compromising, ie a 1 btc Casascius slabbed in 2013 would not have been worth the effort back then, and if you really believed BTC would go to five figures, it would be easier just to buy it. I can't work out if the slabs are dated though? Do ANACS etc put a date on it? Or keep a public facing record? As is, can you tell from looking at pictures of a slabbed coin for sale when it was slabbed?
Sorry to post a thread that has probably come up a million times, I did try to search I promise! And I know it basically comes down to a combination of hope and trust, and bitcoin has been good enough to me that I'm going to keep buying some of it's history to put in a safe and never peel or sell, so in all likely hood I may never even know if one of my coins gets compromised, I'm just interested in possible ways to minimise the hope and trust involved. It would be reasonable easy to write a crawler for addresses/sales on this site, dates and usernames etc, not sure if it would be useful, and does seem a bit invasive. But being able to buy a coin that I could look up and see -> Sold by Smoothie in 2013. Then sold by Loaded to Minerjones in 2017. Then MJ to LesbianCow in 2019. Now for sale by LC. That would make the coin worth more, and be a cool history to go with the coin. But yeah, I could see how it could also be a privacy invading, so maybe opt-in? Or maybe this exists and I'm reinventing the wheel? Or maybe so few coins have sold it's not worth the effort? Dunno, just thinking out loud. The higher bitcoin goes, the more pressure there will be to peel to minimise risk, and I find that a bit sad.
This is all true, and yes, it's been discussed many many times. I think the difficult part of all of this gets muddy here:
1. Many Cas coins were apparently sold to buyers with PGP etc. Lots of secondary buyers weren't given the option, or didn't know to ask, not sure, but you get the point- no accountability, by default I suppose.
2. Same with Lealana - I don't even think there are "full address lists" like with Mike's coins, and smoothie never told people who bought what either, by default ofc.
3. The Lealana XMR coins are even more difficult to ascertain loaded value. Without the skills to use the Monero wallet, it's near impossible to "Prove" an XMR coin is in fact, loaded.
4. Yes, there are many coins floating about that many here have owned. I don't see that being a big deal, since like you say, they were owned by folks like MJ, LC, etc etc...
5. Other coins - Same deal - Titans, CI, everything else - Who knows...
So I guess I didn't help you much, but I am personally not too worried about it with Cas coins since the fulllist.txt exists as well as numerous trackers. History, yeah you'd have to scrape the forum hard then link a lot together... Not much fun..
I don't think there is a true solution to this dilemma, but certainly provenance can't hurt. Cheers.
