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Finds and Interests
I look forward to seeing what exciting items have gone under the hammer at auctions held by our WorthPoint Industry Partners. Our Price Guide updates daily, with thousands of new items streaming in, and I always try to highlight a few of my favorites to share with our followers. There’s usually a good story behind so many of these pieces, and sharing my passion for antique and vintage items is the best part of my job. Let me tell you about an interesting item that one of our partners recently auctioned.
When you mention bitcoin or any kind of cryptocurrency, it brings to mind a digital asset, not a physical item. The mining and trading of bitcoin are complex, but some who got into it early were able to make some money trading amounts of it in cyberspace. Recently, though, Heritage Auctions, a WorthPoint Industry Partner, sold an actual coin with a value and denomination in cryptocurrency. I’ve seen thousands of coins come up for auction, but the existence of a physical bitcoin and the selling price was eye-opening.
It turns out that an early adopter in the crypto world, Mike Caldwell, aka “Casascius” on the BitCoinTalk online forum, created a few physical coins that had BTC value in 2011. To assure buyers that the coins held actual value, his were imprinted with a private key, hidden by a hologram. Casascius produced other denominations, including ₿0.1, ₿0.5, ₿1, ₿10, ₿25, ₿100, and ₿1,000. Still, they stopped production of the coins when industry regulators advised that a “money transmitter license” would be necessary if they wanted to continue making and selling the coins.
Only time will tell if these coins hold any value in currency and BTC prices or as an asset class collectible. The WorthPoint Price Guide has some other sales of physical coins, but it’s essential to know that some are souvenir coins or memorabilia and don’t carry any value in cryptocurrency.