Quote from: casascius on August 08, 2012, 09:40:21 PM

Quote from: Meatpile on August 08, 2012, 09:21:37 PM

- So only the recipient has internet access in your example: he doesnt want to hand you cash until he sees the private key you are handing over actually has money in it. So he can scan it, hand it back and say it was already empty and runs away. Well he just stole the coins.

By the same token, you could hand him a $20 bill, and he could put it in the register, close the drawer, and then claim it was a $10, or that you gave him nothing at all. Your word against his. It's bad for business. At least where I shop.

Quote from: Meatpile on August 08, 2012, 09:21:37 PM

Lets pretend for a minute none of that matters, say casascius physical coins have a hidden private key under a hologram... Well if casascius wants to make any profit at all he has to sell them for more than they are worth. This means that if it is at all possible to make a fake, that costs less than it is worth, the market WILL get flooded with fakes.

That could actually happen, but so far it has not. It's just as possible to make real physical bitcoins and make a profit. At DefCon, I walked around wearing a T-shirt that says "I SELL PHYSICAL BITCOINS", and was charging $15 cash for 1BTC coins worth under $9 at MtGox, selling to anyone who'd stop me in the halls. What's better, the $6 I could make consistently by marking up the coin, or the $9 I could scam people for until I was shut down? Meat may be tasty but you don't slaughter a cash cow.

Quote from: Meatpile on August 08, 2012, 09:21:37 PM

Now there is one scenario that may work: if it costs MORE to produce a physical bitcoin representation than it is worth. In that case you wouldn't want to make a fake that costs more than its worth. But why on earth would anyone do such a thing? They can not make profit and lose money doing it?

The economics of producing holograms are such that it's a big investment to get the holographic master made. On the flip side, if you start scamming people, you'll be left with a bunch of coin materials you can't move because people have caught on to your scam and stopped buying.

In the end, you're right: somebody enterprising could put their efforts into counterfeiting my coins and it would be disappointing. But so far that hasn't happened, and they continue to be a great gift and promotional tool for Bitcoin.

Well there are two different realms here: you are selling these physical bitcoins for novelty and its neat and mostly direct to user sales. Of course you wouldnt sell fakes. But if the whole idea is to have random people trade random "physical bitcoins" all over the world to actually do business, then its not a novelty anymore and real security is very important.

I hate when people fallback to comparing bitcoin thefts to "just like cash". Its a bullshit non-argument. You can't report theft of your intangible digital money to any authority right now, possibly never in the future will it be respected by law enforcement. This is very clear how all the current theives get away scott free. And secondly the BENEFIT of bitcoin is that it is digital, so we should be able to use this to layer hardware security ontop of it so it is better than cash. And lastly, if it is succeptable to ALL of the current problems that cash theft is, plus all the hacking losses, no economy, etc etc... then fuck it why bother.