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THE PARADOX OF PHYSICAL CRYPTOCURRENCYWe've been covering physical cryptocurrency for years. Stack's Bowers has held a number of sales, and Heritage is in the game, too. Andrew Crellin of Australia's Sterling & Currency published an article on the recent Heritage Otoh sale. Here's an excerpt - see the complete article online. -Editor
If you're anything like me, your brain may have gotten caught on a few of the words in that description - PHYSICAL CRYPTOCURRENCY! Yes, if you didn't already know, physical cryptocurrency is not just a paradox, it is a real thing that exists in the world. The "coins" in this auction were a series of Casascius tokens that had been purchased by a collector just after they were minted back in 2013. The Casascius token was a project conceived by an American software engineer whereby tokens were embedded with a Bitcoin value - the digital access key is hidden beneath a hologram and remains intact for as long as the hologram remains unpeeled. I remember seeing something about them in a numismatic periodical or blog when they were first publicized around 2011 - I thought: "Gee that's a pretty neat idea, I should get some of them." Sadly I didn't actually buy one (let alone some), and Bitcoin has of course blossomed in our consciousness ever since then. Keep in mind that the highest price for Bitcoin in 2011 was $31 (dollars, not tens of thousands of dollars!), so it was an expensive oversight. The appeal of the project lives on however, so when I saw the catalogue for the Otoh Collection, I jumped online and bookmarked a few lots. It's a delicious irony that I was so busy this past week appraising a large collection (of physical coins) we're looking to acquire that I missed the cutoff for the auction, so missed out on buying one again! Reviewing the prices realised for the sale is an interesting exercise. Andrew states the situation very clearly. Hindsight is 20/20 and now all of us wish we'd ordered a few mint rolls of these babies back in the day. Today's bitcoin price is near $35,000. -Editor
To read the complete article, see:
THE BOOK BAZARREWayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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