Few factoids that I don’t believe have been discussed here yet  ..

**  “Curiously, BitBills' original website snapshot lists a "© Qugel LLC." Qugel appears to be a secretive project that may (or may not be) similar to BitSpend and reportedly is (was?) an "arbitrage business listing thousands of items for sale."

**BitBills tried to corner the entire physical bitcoin market, filing a patent request that as far as I can tell was never granted. One big reason might be because they didn’t create the idea, Gavin Andresen did - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737.0

Despite the fact that it’s pretty clear BitBills and Casascius both stemmed from Gavin’s idea/the above thread discussion..BitBills wanted Casascius to stop making items ..

“We spoke with Mike Caldwell, creator of Casacius coin - He shared with us an exchange he had with one of the co-founders of BitBills years ago that may shed light on their intentions”.

**[00:45] Just to get this out of the way, do you believe that you own any sort of legally recognized intellectual property that precludes what I am doing?

[00:46] yes

[00:47] Would you mind sending me a copy of its registration?

[00:49] Mike, we'll send you anything as we see fit

[00:50] within the next week likely

[00:50] What would you like for me to do? Are you essentially asking that I stop producing physical bitcoins?

[00:52] You could license our tech

[00:52] Do you have a patent on the idea of embedding private keys in objects?

[00:52] I performed a quick search and wasn't able to find such a thing

[00:52] we're in the application process

[00:53] patents take a couple of years to issue

[00:53] in some cases at least

[00:54] you might have a partnership option

[00:55] So what you are saying is you want me to pay you a fee for making physical bitcoins, just so I understand you correctly

[00:56] I never said that

[00:56] You mentioned licensing, so that's how I understood that. If wrong, what do you have in mind?

[00:57] All I'm saying is that it's our position that you've copied our tech.**

Mr. Caldwell also suggested that most of the ideas covered by Mr. Feigelson's proposed patent were discussed in public years earlier”.

Source : https://letstalkbitcoin.com/477