1 - How does one verify that it was you who made the coin?
1 - I chose a hologram with the name Casascius on it, because that would be prohibitively expensive ($thousands) for someone else to duplicate. And if they're going to go to the effort, they may as well make their own legitimate coins (clearly there's a demand) rather than perpetrating a fraud that would get quickly found out.
I don't completely agree here. Say this runs for a while and the coins gain a lot of trust and are maybe even used in real life in some community as a local
currency commodity of value-exchange.
Some thousands of $ to counterfeit the hologram would then be negligible. Your argument that the counterfeiter could instead just make his own coins is weak, because of all the trust your coins have already gained (no incident of money missing from coin addresses, usage over many months, you being a responsive and respected guy over a long period of time), that cannot be as easily reproduced as the coins themselves.
I think you did a good enough job with the holograms for now, though. It'll do for quite a while.
Thanks for a great job! Any news on international shipping? If I wasn't going on vacation soon I'd offer to be european shipping hub...