Bitbills are Bitcoins you can hold in your hand | Hacker News Reader

Bitbills are Bitcoins you can hold in your hand

bitbills.com

53 pointsjaysonelliot34 comments

How many unicorn dollars can I pay you to keep these posts off the front page?

I had to upvote this for the humor, but I have yet to flag a Bitcoin post. It's technology, it's interesting, and some are clearly interested in talking about it, which sounds on-topic to me. Funny, though.

It'd be useful if the website demonstrated redeeming a card, because the process sounds painful.

Conversely, if the smallest denomination is one bitcoin, you wouldn't be able to give change in a physical situation.

My thoughts exactly on the redeeming process.

One potential problem is that the receiver must be familiar with bitbills before accepting them. There is no clear way to demonstrate the bills value without consuming it.

If I own four bitcoins that are each worth $10, if I bought something for $32, the cashier would give me $8 back in cash?

If the price of a bitcoin rises to something not easily handled (e.g. each are worth $1000), what's the bitcoin answer to that? Getting change in USD/EUROS/etc? Are there fractional currencies like pennies, nickels, dimes, etc?

The plan is to just move the decimal point as needed to keep it reasonable. (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_gene...)

At some point people may switch to mBTC (1/1000th of a BTC). And you could call 0.01 mBTC a "bitcent".

But as I understand it, each Bitcoin has a unique hash. So when you start dividing up the ownership of that hash, how do you keep track of partial transactions, etc?

I think the name "Bitcoin" is confusing, because the system doesn't really have coins — it has addresses and transactions. Money just flows from the output(s) of one transaction to the input(s) of another. BTC can be arbitrarily divided by creating a transaction with multiple outputs; one is the payee and one is change going back to the payer. (I apologize that that probably makes no sense; I think you really have to read Satoshi's paper to understand it.)

bitcoins are infinitely divisible.

Well, it's not infinite. But 8 places are pretty close to infinite.

Not. Even. Close.

The standard allows for precision extensions.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_divisible_are_Bitcoins?

For small degrees of infinite.

I'll admit I am not extremely well versed on the BitCoin market, but the situation you just stated sounds no different to me than trying to pay someone with, say, my GE stock certificates?

How is this different than stock?

No real difference, I was just driving the point of BitCoin's usefullness as a way of making general everyday transactions.

> No real difference, I was just driving the point of BitCoin's usefullness as a way of making general everyday transactions.

That is, not useful at all.

Seriously - have you actually tried to use stock certificates to buy anything?

Very cool! I hope they can pull it off because if they do, it'll lead to some very interesting stuff...

Be even cooler if you could buy them with cash...

There's http://ubitex.org for that.

It's a platform for local trading of bitcoin. (Sorry for the initial mislinking)

Perhaps a clever way to give Bitcoins as a gift?

aka "How to annoy your friends on their birthdays"

Personally I just give 'em vouchers for free personality tests at the Church of Scientology.

I fear this will lead to bitcrackpots giving bitbills to people who don't want them as a form of evangelism.

Feel free to give me any bitcoins or bitbills you don't want. Problem solved.

> Any card can be converted back into digital bitcoins at any time, but doing so destroys the card.

What if you can convert it without destroying the card? How can anyone check "offline" whether or not the card still has the money?

I don't think you can be certain offline, but it looks like the back of the card has an address where the money is stored. Presumably this will indicate if the card has been redeemed. It also lets you be sure someone didn't just print up some cards and hologram stickers themselves.

My guess is that, as someone accepting payment, you refuse if the card already has its hologram on the back peeled off.

I don't understand why an intact hologram is a proof of security. What if you saw through it?

And not just me, I mean lets just say I'm being ignorant and hologram is perfectly secure. How are you gonna convince the masses?

It's already an acceptable approach with other money substitutes (gift cards, pre-paid phone cards, etc), where you have to scrape off a film to get a code.

It looks like they do not offer any good way to deal with forgery. The card and the hologram are not terribly hard to produce. Also unlike the usual bills they would not have the strong legal protection from counterfeiting.

Brings up a very interesting question I haven't seen wnswered yet:

What happens to the bitcoin economy when peoples bills get lost, or more interesting, if disks crash without a backup?

It's addressed on their web site.

In short, bitcoin currency is inherently deflationary due to natural loss of coins. The problem, however, is mitigated by their infinite divisibility - a million years from now the whole world will only have one bit coin in operation, and everyone will operate in pico-coins. A pint of beer - 5 picocoins, hourly wage - 100 picocoins.

So, how is bitcoin different than the Million Dollar Homepage? Tradeability?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

What are the similarities?

Limited supply.

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