Between 2011 and 2013, a man put more than 90,000 Bitcoin into physical coins. FinCEN forced him to stop. Most of those coins are still out there, unpeeled.
Mike Caldwell was a software engineer in Utah who thought Bitcoin was too abstract for people to take seriously. So he started minting actual metal coins with real Bitcoin loaded inside them. He called them Casascius coins.
Each coin had a private key printed on paper and sealed under a tamper-proof hologram. Peel the sticker, reveal the key, claim the Bitcoin. Once peeled the coin becomes just a piece of metal.
He minted nearly 28,000 of them. Denominations from 0.5 BTC up to 1,000 BTC. Only 6 of the 1,000 BTC coins were ever made. Those six alone are woth hundreds of millions of dollars at current prices.
In late 2013, FinCEN sent him a letter saying his buiness could qualify as money transmission and require registration. He suspended production immediately tbh.
Around 80% of the coins issued are estimated to still be unpeeled somewhere in the world right now. Some in safes. Some probably in junk drawers. Some might be in the hands of people who have no idea what they're sitting on.
They keep waking up. Two 1,000 BTC coins moved $179 million last year after 13 years of silence. A 25 BTC coin was peeled recently, moving roughly $1.78 million worth of Bitcoin on-chain.
The wildest part is that intact coins sell for multiples of their Bitcoin value because collectors want the sealed artifact more than the crypto inside it. A physical object worth more than the digital asset it contains.
So are Casascious coins the most valuable collectibles in financial history, or just the strangest way to store a fortune?