Bad news indeed. Private keys will last forever, but no business or website will last FOREVER, and once that goes down, your coins go down with them. Or if you're in a pinch and need to access the keys during the small chance their servers are offline or their hosting is down, you're shit out of luck too.
That's quite a shame, otherwise the coin/design is beautiful.
I have a private key version, so theoretically, I can claim the funds at any time. It's not being able to reference the coin on the blockchain using the information on the coin itself that kills me. With any other physical coin I've purchased, I can derive the public key using the first bits on my own.
You're right though, if they go out of business, their 2 Factor coins are useless.
There's lots of reasons why we chose to centralize the coin database and use our own coin ID, but I think they're probably all in the thread above. Having fewer steps to verify that the coin's address is funded is the big one. Anyone can pick up one of our coins and scan the back with a smartphone, regardless of whether they know what a bitcoin is or not.
The 2-factor coins have less of a learning curve for people who are just getting into bitcoins. They typically like the fact that they can redeem them on our website. For people that understand bitcoins, we proudly sell the exact same coins with private keys. We're not running any kind of fractional reserve, so if we need to shut down the business, we'll be emailing out links to download an encrypted version of the private keys for all our 2FA coins. We'll also be keeping the site running for many years after we shut down. The hosting and maintenance is already bought and paid for. Nobody is getting screwed when we shut down.
