An interesting auction catalogue landed on my desk a few weeks back - it was for "The OTOH Collection of Physical Cryptocurrency", a pioneering sale in the world of numismatics.

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.

To read the complete article, see:
Up for Sale - The Paradox of Physical Cryptocurrency(https://www.sterlingcurrency.com.au/blog/news-research/market-news/up-for-sale-the-paradox-of-physical-cryptocurrency/)