When Max Mellenbruch began making Kialara bitcoin cold storage wallets in 2014, he set a new bar for design, quality and creative vision. The original Kialara was a startlingly new take on what a cold storage wallet could be, and his later Labyrinth and Signature Series designs were no less inspiring.
Along the way, though, he’d ended up with some extra components from the original series. Instead of letting them go to waste, he made two new iterations on the original design and released them in limited edition runs in 2015. For one, he replaced the steel medallion in the center with a sterling silver one, and for the other, gold.
Another creator might have called it a day, but Mellenbruch went on to make so many other small tweaks that these gold and silver series Kialaras really shine as their own objects, and are much sought after by collectors.
The denomination was changed from “100,000 bits” to “One Bitcoin,” for starters. There was a new hologram on the front, and on the reverse “Blockchain.info” was changed to “Blockr.io.”
The most striking change, though, was changing the aluminum housing to one made from stainless steel, polished to a mirror finish. This not only makes the whole thing shine with a near-holy glow, but it doubles the weight so it feels… awesome. It’s hard to say why heavier things feel as if they’re higher quality, but they do.
In this case, that feeling of quality runs deep, like a vein of precious metal.
Standard disclaimer: It’s always, to some degree, a bad idea to let anyone else have access to a private key which controls any of your bitcoin wallets; in a sense, it goes counter to the bitcoin system itself. Once someone else has handled the key which controls your funds, you have to trust both that they exercised adequate security procedures while handling your key, and that they have not save copies of your key to exploit at some point in the unforeseen future. While some (such as Mike Caldwell of Casascius) have established trusted reputations, newer operators can only prove their trustworthiness over time.
0.001 BTC
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