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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

The only use case I see to this is a non-electronic cold storage. Which is cool, but then do we really need all the fancy note cutting?

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Gifting cold storage is the main case we see here. Namely to someone who might throw out a printed private key. We spoke with many Bitcoiners who know that friends and family lost coins they gave them in the early days simply because a printed private key doesn't have much gravitas.

What advantage does this have over a thick, pretty foil envelope with nice embossing telling people what the printed code/long barcode/micro-SD card inside is for?

The psychology of cash and how people hold and spend it is unique from any other physical financial instruments. They keep it safer and spend less than they would with credit cards or debit cards.

A completely foreign object with a printed key might be kept safe -- but it isn't intuitive to do so. We heard multiple stories of people gifting Bitcoin at events like weddings only for private keys to be tossed out with cards.

Why not just give the newlywed couple a dump truck full of coal, which is much harder to lose track of, so they can burn it to mine their own bitcoin?

Isn’t this also just a full circle, where we are back at printing a currency?

I already have a secure, self custodial wallet, it’s called cash in my wallet.

Yeah, but when you give me that cash to buy a hot dog from me, how can I verify that I am the actual owner of the received cash?

I see no way how we can solve this problem! /s

How can people hold on onto their birth certificate? The infrastructure is already in place for that, so the problem is that they didn’t understand that that piece of paper was worth money.

Handing over a monopoly bill will have the same fate. You can’t keep it in your wallet and it can be lost easily.

Either way this is a ridiculous project and would probably best be served by the concept of “gift card” instead, given your explanation.

Sorry, I don't follow any of your reasoning here. Monopoly money is a low cost print with little detail on standard paper. People don't throw away foreign currency simply because they don't know what it's worth. I'd recommend taking a look at the psychology of cash to understand my point better.

> People don't throw away foreign currency

Are you sure? If I find a single bill from a random country I assume the worth isn't a whole lot. Such bills get stashed in the souvenir box which may or may not be thrown out at any point when space runs out.

> I don't follow any of your reasoning here

I don't think the birth certificate analogy is that hard to follow. It's easier to hold onto a US-letter-sized document than it is to save a single bill that you should not place in a wallet.

Except apparently you need to be online to send them the info after you cut the note. So its not really cold storage. What if their company shuts down?

You can do cold storage by securing seeds on metal, such as titanium, or any robust material you like.

No, still cold storage. If the company shuts down you can use the plaintext user key to claim the funds from the note after January 3rd 2029.

How are you doing time-lock encryption in this instance? Is it based off of a separate blockchain contract or is it one of the more traditional methods?

OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY in the multisig.

But why time lock it?

The time lock lets you optimistically circulate the note prior to the expiration date as even if previous holders know the user key they cannot use it to claim the Bitcoin alone.

Sure, so you add it as part of the P2MS script but that doesn't solve the issue of every re-key costing money

Is this because you have a time-locked transaction to move the funds from the P2MS to a P2PKH? How does that work when it's "re-keyed"? Wouldn't each re-key move to a new P2MS and have a transaction fee associated with it as well as have a second transaction for the HTLC transaction?

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