Introducing Bitbills!

[Ryland R. Taylor-Almanza]

I think you're going to have to make a lot more values of bitbills now. Your current lowest bitbill is worth around $8 usd!

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[Mike Hearn]

A few thoughts, worth what you paid for them

• The B symbol you're using is already taken by the Thai Baht. You might want to use Ⓑ instead. They're both in Unicode so you should be able to print them, hopefully.
• To handle counterfeiting you could create a second private key (that is not associated with coins) and put the public key in a second QRcode on the back. You can then release an open source Android/iPhone app that scans that code, creates a random nonce, sends it to bitbills.com for signing and then verifies the signature using the public key on the card. Because only you have the second private key, it's impossible to forge this. It's convenient for anyone to check the bill is legitimate using only a smartphone, so it can be done portably and quickly.
• Your exchange rates are way out of whack, this will lead to heavy arbitrage if you aren't careful. Given the wild volatility right now I'd suggest automatically adjusting the prices on your website direct from MtGox.

This is a really interesting project, good luck! Once the first happy customers post here I might order some as well.

[llama]

For the first round, we shipped with delivery confirmation on the larger orders. In the future, we plan to ship all orders with delivery confirmation, and add an option to purchase insurance for an additional fee (we'll charge about what we get charged).

The manufacturing process is secure.

[BitterTea]

Your exchange rates are way out of whack, this will lead to heavy arbitrage if you aren't careful. Given the wild volatility right now I'd suggest automatically adjusting the prices on your website direct from MtGox.

The prices are actually listed in bitcoin, not USD. Or are you talking about something else?

[Mike Hearn]

Oh sorry, so they are. I seem to have read the second B symbol as a dollar.

[Sukrim]

The manufacturing process is secure.

Nice statement... As I guess you do not manufacture them yourself in the backyard - so which company actually handles the manufacturing?

[llama]

The manufacturing process is secure.

Nice statement... As I guess you do not manufacture them yourself in the backyard - so which company actually handles the manufacturing?

Currently, I actually do do all of the final assembly myself. The only piece that involves another company is the printing of the card "blanks", but the actual private keys are still printed and inserted by myself. For security reasons, I will not describe the process specifics in great depth. In the near future, we will be adding more team members to help with assembly, but this will all still take place in-house.

[SgtSpike]

The manufacturing process is secure.

Nice statement... As I guess you do not manufacture them yourself in the backyard - so which company actually handles the manufacturing?

Currently, I actually do do all of the final assembly myself. The only piece that involves another company is the printing of the card "blanks", but the actual private keys are still printed and inserted by myself. For security reasons, I will not describe the process specifics in great depth. In the near future, we will be adding more team members to help with assembly, but this will all still take place in-house.

I like the fact that the company head is the only person touching/knowing the private keys.  The fewer people involved in the process, the better, IMO.  Less chance for bad things to happen.

[foo]

bitbills.com seems to have disappeared from DNS... What's up?

[PwrLeveld]

It's good for me, before saying a site is down use downforeveryoneorjustme.com. It helps from mixups like this. It is posible that whatever DNS server you are using is messing up. With my old DNS I couldn't go to heliohost.org but when I switched to google's DNS server I can.

[legkodymov]

Please don't think of bills as real money. It may work only as gift certificate, nothing else.
You can buy those hologram stickers on Ebay easily, read private key and reseal it.
Increasing security wouldn't give much result, as even govnmnt's bills are falsificated succesfully.
Don't think you can get this bill from a stranger and be 100% it will not be redeemed in few days later by someone else, not you.

Act responsibly!!!

[llama]

Please don't think of bills as real money. It may work only as gift certificate, nothing else.
You can buy those hologram stickers on Ebay easily, read private key and reseal it.
Increasing security wouldn't give much result, as even govnmnt's bills are falsificated succesfully.
Don't think you can get this bill from a stranger and be 100% it will not be redeemed in few days later by someone else, not you.

Act responsibly!!!

If government bills are not real money, what is?

[Ian Maxwell]

Why the surcharge increase on the ฿20 bill? Especially with bitcoins having appreciated since they were introduced. Are they so expensive to produce that you have to use the larger denominations to subsidize the smaller, or what?

I was hoping the surcharge would drop low enough that I wouldn't feel like a sucker buying ฿1 bills. 0.100 over face value would have seemed reasonable.

[llama]

Why the surcharge increase on the ฿20 bill? Especially with bitcoins having appreciated since they were introduced. Are they so expensive to produce that you have to use the larger denominations to subsidize the smaller, or what?

I was hoping the surcharge would drop low enough that I wouldn't feel like a sucker buying ฿1 bills. 0.100 over face value would have seemed reasonable.

We did increase the fee for the ฿20 bill. We feel that it's important to integrate stronger security features, including custom holograms, as early as possible. However, we need to finance the high capital costs associated with these improvements. During this period of particularly high demand for Bitbills relative to our supply, we've decided to increase the fees a bit as a fundraising measure. The ฿20 bill was the most natural product to raise the fee on, since the new fee brings it's percentage surcharge closer to that of the other bills.

As production continues to ramp up in the next couple weeks, definitely expect the fees to go down. We may also consider switching to set fee across all denominations.

[kiba]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2551391

Bitbills on hacker news!

[koin]

You can buy those hologram stickers on Ebay easily, read private key and reseal it.

you've tried this yourself?

[Insuremeplz]

Received my bitbills today! Thanks for the professional service. I'm going to give the 1's and 5's out as gifts. Haven't actually tried to redeem any, so hopefully someone else can verify that process goes smoothly.

[rebuilder]

Could you have a searchable database of the addresses associated with your bills? That would let the user have some peace of mind that the BitBills they're buying have at least been issued by you, making it harder for others to print counterfeit copies.

It's still not perfect, as anyone with access to the same holograms you use could print their own cards, pick a few addresses from the database and print those on the back of their fake cards, but at least it introduces some risk of discovery if whoever is the real owner of the card with the address the scammer hypothetically picked redeems their bill, and limits the number of fakes possible to make.

[EvanR]

I just got my bitbills, they are awesome.

For gods sake, I don't see the point of rehashing the same three (two) potential problems with bitbills over and over. Llama covered it earlier as much as could be covered.

They are designed to be hard to counterfeit, no you can't just go to the dollar store buy the stickers and make indistinguishable replicas. (You can fool stupid people, but that's not a problem bitcoin or anything else can solve).

They are designed to be tamper resistant, no you can't unpeel a sticker, read a private key, and put it back without damaging the plastic. Llama, the choice of putting a smaller sticker on a larger QR code makes it appear to lazy screenshot researchers that that is the only security, like a supermarket price tag or something. People are confused and also willing to spread misconceptions about it.

Can't wait for the next version!

[BitcoinsWallet]

I love this project, congratulations, llama!