I’m Mike Caldwell, the producer of the Casascius physical bitcoin in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have been an enthusiast of the Bitcoin peer-to-peer cryptocurrency by Satoshi Nakamoto since I first encountered it in December 2010. I have always felt that a monetary solution based on cryptography was possible and useful, and that it was only a matter of time until somebody put it together and did it right.

Casascius Coins were created as an educational pursuit to help regular people understand a peer-to-peer virtual currency. I created them with the belief that very few would be able to conceptualize the value of a bitcoin if they couldn’t hold it in their hand or put it in their pocket in the form of a tangible non-electronic object.

Casascius is a name I made up before ever deciding I would use it for a coin project. The root, “CASAS”, is a simple acronym for the phrase “call a spade a spade”, to which I added an ending I thought would make it sound like a personified Shakespearean or Roman sort of name. It is properly pronounced “ka-SAY-shuss”, though I am not bothered by the variations I hear.

https://casascius.wordpress.com/about/