What does a bitcoin really look like? And how can a non-tangible currency be photographed?

What does a bitcoin really look like? And how can a non-tangible currency be photographed?

30 September 2014, 09:37
Anton Voropaev
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We can easily recognize any of major circulating currencies. Euros, dollars and pounds are easy to visualize, what cannot be said, however, about cryptocurrencies.

For those who are not yet completely sure, what a bitcoin is, it is a form of digital currency, created and kept electronically. No one controls it. Bitcoins aren’t printed, like generally accepted currencies – they’re produced by lots of people running computers all around the world, using software that solves mathematical problems. It’s the first example of a growing category of money known as cryptocurrency. No one prints it. This currency isn’t physically printed in the shadows by a central bank, unaccountable to the population, and is making its own rules.

This, however, became a real advantage for George Frey. His pictures are used by dozens of media resources.

frey bitcoin getty

The picture by Frey you see above is ranked the most popular photograph on Gettyimages.com.

As he commented to Bloomberg News, “I’ve sort of cornered the market on bitcoin photos.”

But if a bitcoin isn’t a physical object, what exactly are we looking at in Frey’s photographs?

They’re called Casascius bitcoins, and they were minted, in a variety of metals, by software engineer Mike Caldwell at his home in Sandy, Utah. An early bitcoin adopter, Caldwell wanted to help popularize the cryptocurrency - but he, too, grappled with its intangibility.

“No one is going to get this if I can’t show them something,” Caldwell remembers thinking.

Thus, in September 2011, he began making physical coins as vessels. He embedded inside of each a piece of paper that contained a bitcoin private key, which he protected with a tamper-resistant hologram sticker. As for the word casascius, it was half acronym (derived from the phrase “call a spade a spade”), half Latin-sounding suffix (“cius”).

However, after November 27, 2013 Caldwell does not make any real bitcoins any more. His activity was stopped by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, as the body considered his activity to be money transmitting and specified that he lacked the necessary license.

Since that time, Caldwell has sold only aluminum promo coins via his website, Casascius.com. A bag of 500 costs 0.39 bitcoin - about $150, as of yesterday. All told, Caldwell minted about 60,000 Casascius bitcoins. Bitcoin fans consider them collectibles - especially the earliest ones, which have fetched as much as $2,500 each on EBay because of a typo in the hologram.

This does not really matter for Frey, whose photos continue to be downloaded via Getty. Frey says he’s made more than $10,000 off the images, which he shot at Caldwell’s home, accepting only the US currency.

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