Ok I may be too late to chip in. What if we embrace NFC technology for the bitcoins. the say we create plastic coins that have extremely nearfield nfc electronic chips. the coins then can be pre-programmed with say 1 bitcoin (a private key with one BTC is written on the chip memory) I strongly believe that these chips can be used NEARLY OFFLINE because a system (or APP ) can be created to verify the token offline. Users of the token just need verify the authenticity of the token and the final enduser can redeem the token value online and render the token worthless. Its complex but BTC on its own is complex, yet it was done.