Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_von_NotHaus


I would stick with the novelty aspect. Sell them at a price point to recognize a nice little profit. It would only take a little creative marketing to reach your goal.

These put the coin in bitcoin.

Instead of charging a premium...you could always try to pay for the overhead with advertising.

You can get a sponsor for putting a logo on X amount of coins. Just put a McDonalds logo on one side instead of the "B" or whichever logo.

Who knows, maybe the cost would be covered by the ads.

You can also put advertising on the pages that you sell the coins on with a "sponsored by Meze Grill"

These are cool, but I'm curious why people feel the need to have a tangible bitcoin.  To me it kind of reminds me how early autos were made to look like horse drawn buggies.  I get the need for some people to have a physical way of securing bitcoins because of the current usability issues with doing that digitally, but aside from that and the novelty aspect, what is compelling about them?  For me, one of the great advantages of bitcoin is that it does away with the need for such a physical manifestation of a token (while not losing some important properties of physical token).

Hmm.  I don't think I like that much.
I guess it wouldn't be that hard for someone to counterfeit the brass coin itself.. but It seems odd to me that you'd encourage some other provider to produce something that looks extremely similar.  Do you mean that the brass coin itself would be identical, and only the hologram would indicate who the coin loader was?

These would be awesome for bitcoin geocaches.

Yes, I get that and that's reason enough...I was just wondering whether people had more utilitarian reasons for wanting them.

I have been thinking about this a bit and have a couple of suggestions for "version 2.0" of this product:

* On the metal blanks ditch the denomination.  Instead of "1 bitcoin" say "bitcoins".  Keep the rest the same.
* On the holographic side replace the printed short public key with the QR of the public key.  This is so it can be easily scanned to determine the stored value by a smart phone application.
* Inside keep the private key the same.

I can imagine a holographic sticker with a clear "window" and under the window you simply put a small square of material with the QR on one side and the short private key on the other.  Very simple, easy to mass produce, easy to assemble:

* Produce large sheets of material with 100s of the public QR embossed on one side and the corresponding short private key embossed on the other side.
* Cut into tiny squares in one step, producing 100s of squares for each sheet.
* Stick the squares on the sticky side of the holographic sticker with the QR facing out
* Attach the stickers to the blanks
* They could be sold with no BTC in the account, just the blank "coin", or they could be preloaded as is being done now.

Now, here is one use case I have already run across:  My elderly parents want to be able to have me buy them bitcoins over time.  They just want some in their portfolio, along with some gold, silver, etc. "just in case they go up".  They consider them like a penny stock.  They do not want to get involved with putting the client on their computer, getting a dwolla account, getting an exchange account, etc.  They just want me to set up an account for them, they send me cash, I buy them BTC.

This is perfect!  I buy them one of these physical coins, I remember the public key, I send it to them, they put it in their safe until they want to cash it in.  Whenever they want to buy some more BTC they send me a check, I sell them some of mine or buy some for them on the open market and then transfer the BTC to their "coin" in their safe.

They are very excited about this whole idea where they were very put off by my previous explanations of how I could get them the client.  They were very concerned about someone stealing them off their computer, stealing their computer, losing their computer or their computer crashing, etc.

The idea of having the coin in the safe is very appealing to them.

One reason is just as a talking point when introducing people to bitcoin.
I already carry a few bitbills around in my pocket - having a casascius bitcoin as well will help make it clear that there is no central issuer and that the value is all in the private key.

I'm also giving a few to family as gifts.  While it would be easy to give them a thumb-drive and password etc - that's just not going to have any impact.
A physical representation of a bitcoin will be something people are far more likely to enjoy and keep safe and it will possibly get some of them interested in the concepts behind bitcoin.