A crypto whale has apparently redeemed a Casascius Bitcoin bar presently valued at around $745,000.
Casascius bars and coins are physical metal Bitcoin collectibles that were created by Mike Caldwell and sold until late 2013 in increments of 1, 10, 25, 100, and 1000 BTC. The brass coins and the gold-plated bars can be redeemed for actual BTC. They come with an embedded piece of paper containing a BTC address and private key protected by a tamper-proof hologram.
Caldwell explains,
“To recover the digital bitcoins, there are several ways to convert the embedded code back into a digital bitcoin so it can be spent over the internet. Most importantly, none of the methods relies on me or any other central issuer, due to Bitcoin’s completely decentralized design. The embedded private key code is everything a Bitcoin client needs to find and claim the digital Bitcoins from the peer-to-peer network.”
The recent redemption of the Casascius bar was tracked by the Casascius Bot on Twitter, which monitors movements related to the rare gold-plated bars.
The Casascius S2-BAR-100, minted on February 4, 2013, was holding 100 BTC, data from casasciustracker.com confirms.
The Casascius Bot keeps track of all the peeled Casascius crypto coins and bars. The bot keeps records of the most recent peels, which include a redeemed S2-COIN-25 coin worth 25 BTC.
During the past month, the bot has reported a number of new coin peels, with the majority being valued at 1 BTC.