- A long-time holder of a 100 BTC Casascius bar has cashed out after 13 years
- The bar, originally purchased in 2012 for around $500, is now worth over $10 million.
- The user, “JohnGalt,” shared the experience on Bitcointalk, revealing years of hesitation and failed attempts to sell
Thirteen years of Bitcoin history were peeled open a few weeks ago when a ₿100 Casascius bar was redeemed for $10 million. Bitcointalk forum member JohnGalt revealed in mid-May that he redeemed his ₿100 Casascius bar—one of the rarest and most iconic physical bitcoins—for the windfall, seemingly unable to resist any longer. The sale of Casascius bitcoins was outlawed in 2013 when U.S. authorities found that their sale constituted operating a money transmitting business.
The Rarity of Physical Bitcoins
Casascius coins and bars, created by Utah-based Mike Caldwell in the early 2010s, were physical coins or bars loaded with real bitcoins. Each came with a hidden private key under a tamper-evident hologram, with denominations ranging from ₿0.1 to ₿1,000. Given that Bitcoin was trading at around $10 during this time, such purchases weren’t much of an undertaking.
Caldwell’s production line was brought to a swift halt in November 2013 when the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) informed him that selling the items with the BTC inside them qualified him as operating a money transmitting business, necessitating registration at the federal level and potential state licenses. Caldwell stopped producing bitcoin-filled versions immediately, making all those already purchased genuine collector’s items.
“I Just Couldn’t Keep Sitting On It”
One purchaser of a ₿100 bar was long-time BitcoinTalk member JohnGalt, who revealed on May 13 that he had finally parted with his bar. JohnGalt wrote that when Bitcoin crossed $10,000 in 2017, he “started getting real nervous,” adding, “Holding onto something worth over a million dollars? That’s a lot of pressure.”
Of course, Bitcoin has moved another 10x since then, and JohnGalt revealed that holding onto it had not been an easy process:
I did try to sell it a few times, but it’s hard selling something that valuable, and you really can’t trust just anyone. I even looked into auctions, but I’d be getting less than what the Bitcoin itself was worth.
Eventually, however, sitting on $10 million proved too much to resist, even after 13 years of hodling:
Now that it’s worth over $10 million, I knew I couldn’t keep just sitting on it. So, yeah… even though I was kinda unsure, I finally redeemed it today.
The unsealing of JohnGalt’s bar takes the number of unsealed ₿100 bars to 182, with 35 still left untouched. Of the two ₿500 bars ever made, one remains unsealed, while of the 14 ₿1,000 bars made, just two remain unpeeled; those lucky holders are sitting on a treasure trove worth a staggering $106 million.
