Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: High-resolution images of physical bitcoins
by
casascius
on 14/09/2011, 06:34:20 UTC
Forgive me if this was already discussed, but the address pictured had no value at the time of the original post...now it contains 1 bitcoin...are you loading them as you fill orders? Are the private addresses really destroyed (save the copy in the coin)?

Yes and yes.  I load each coin once I have confirmed that I haven't rejected it for some reason (such as ruining the label while peeling it - which happens a fair bit - and there's only one for each address).  Of course, only the public addresses are needed for this process.  I have a little app that helps me load them in large batches using the bitcoind "sendmany" RPC command.

The private keys were generated on a fresh OS install dedicated just for the purpose, on a computer that never connected to any networks, and the entire batch printed on sheets of paper directly from that machine.  I have since securely erased the hard drive.