Just a quick status report on silver coins. Some of you have received your silver coins. Others, I’m still working on them. Actually, I should say we’re still working on them, as I have someone working full time to help with production and shipment. A short round of applause for Natalie!
We have had one setback that has been resolved, and that’s with the 1oz silver rounds. Turns out, the hologram sticker really is quite a tight fit, and there’s pretty much zero tolerance for even a normal amount of variation in the placement. If the placement wasn’t exact, the edge of the sticker would curl.
So here’s what we’ve done: the laser machine I use to cut the private keys, is now being used to apply a thin “heat melt” border to the edge of the sticker, resolving the fit problem. This appears on the hologram as a sparkly “gold ring” effect and actually turned out pretty nice. The flip side is that most orders containing 1BTC silver coins have been held up, and I anticipate it will probably be another week before those can be sent out.
Here’s some quick stats on orders versus production: I have paid orders for about 34 rolls of twenty 1BTC silver coins, and have produced and shipped 12 of them. For the half ounce half BTC coins, I have paid orders for about 35 rolls, and have produced and shipped about 28 of them. That’s about 1,100 coins.
Here is something important as well: Unlike what I’ve done in the past, I plan to delay the funding of BTC on the coins such that I fund all of the first shipped silver coins all in a single very large transaction. This allows all of the coins to have the status of being “first funded” (a distinction your coins in production/transit won’t have if I had already funded whichever ones happened to have arrived first). So two things to note: 1) if you redeem your coin now, it won’t have anything on it, and 2) don’t fund your own coin, otherwise it will become an overfunded coin when I send out the funding transaction.
When will I do this? I anticipate sending out this mass fund transaction as soon as the majority of the initial 1,100 coins have been received, basically, once we’ve managed to work through the backlog. Meanwhile, if you check the block chain, you will notice that the BTC you sent me to buy your coins will sit on the block chain exactly where you paid them to me without being moved around. They’ll be used to fund the silver coins, a process that will happen completely airgapped and offline (they’re sitting in a separate secure offline wallet, and when funding occurs, the completed transaction will be introduced to the network with a raw transaction saved on a flash drive).
You may have heard that Noah Luis aka Smoothie on the Bitcointalk forums has released “Lealana Litecoins”, essentially a physical Litecoin similar to my offering. His current product is a half-ounce silver round loaded with 10 Litecoins, and is available for sale for both BTC and LTC directly from him. I support his efforts and am pleased to see what he has produced.
casascius 