Agora Commodities has managed to sell quite $10m-worth of gold and silver for bitcoin since it started acceptive the cryptocurrency last year.

The firm points out that bitcoin gained quite 4000% in price last year, though that’s not the company’s primary focus, that is additional on shiny, tangible commodities instead of digital currencies.

The biggest rush came in late 2013, because the worth of bitcoin skyrocketed. Clearly, there have been several speculators World Health Organization determined to trade their bitcoins for precious metals.

Just obtaining started

Agora Commodities could be a comparatively young company, however it's already the most important dealer of precious metals for bitcoin on the earth. additionally to gold and silver, the corporate conjointly sells noble metal, atomic number 46 and Rh.

The company sells a large vary of product, starting from one weight unit gold bars priced at $43,000, to one-ounce silver coins priced at $21.

Bitcoin lovers will even mix their love of cryptocurrencies and precious metals with Agora’s Silver Bitcoin mintage, a quarter-bitcoin piece priced at $23.50. No bitcoin enclosed, of course. It options a handy QR code on the rear and therefore the style is quite nice, particularly the binary string on the margin.

The only drawback is that international shipping is kind of pricey, increasing the value of the acquisition considerably. So, unless you propose to create a considerable investment in precious metals, it should not be worthy – particularly if you were puzzling over discovering one coin as a present, or a geeky center.

Coins as BTC wallets

If all this mouth physical coins sounds acquainted, don’t worry, it should. electro-acoustic transducer writer, the businessperson behind Casascius has been minting physical bitcoins for a minute. However, his efforts were curtailed last year, once the U.S.A. monetary Crimes social control Network (FinCEN) dominated that his activities were basically ‘money transmitting’ which he failed to have a allow to hold out such services.

Caldwell then turned to minting unfunded coins, that feature personal keys and might be stocked BTC by the client. writer describes them as “paper bitcoin wallets within a coin container”.

While physical coins aren’t terribly sensible, and that they area unit basically the other of what a digital currency was meant to be, they are doing look quite bit additional appealing (and durable) than your average paper pocketbook.

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