I had to upvote this for the humor, but I have yet to flag a Bitcoin post. It's technology, it's interesting, and some are clearly interested in talking about it, which sounds on-topic to me. Funny, though.
One potential problem is that the receiver must be familiar with bitbills before accepting them. There is no clear way to demonstrate the bills value without consuming it.
If I own four bitcoins that are each worth $10, if I bought something for $32, the cashier would give me $8 back in cash?
If the price of a bitcoin rises to something not easily handled (e.g. each are worth $1000), what's the bitcoin answer to that? Getting change in USD/EUROS/etc? Are there fractional currencies like pennies, nickels, dimes, etc?
But as I understand it, each Bitcoin has a unique hash. So when you start dividing up the ownership of that hash, how do you keep track of partial transactions, etc?
I think the name "Bitcoin" is confusing, because the system doesn't really have coins — it has addresses and transactions. Money just flows from the output(s) of one transaction to the input(s) of another. BTC can be arbitrarily divided by creating a transaction with multiple outputs; one is the payee and one is change going back to the payer. (I apologize that that probably makes no sense; I think you really have to read Satoshi's paper to understand it.)
I'll admit I am not extremely well versed on the BitCoin market, but the situation you just stated sounds no different to me than trying to pay someone with, say, my GE stock certificates?
It looks like they do not offer any good way to deal with forgery. The card and the hologram are not terribly hard to produce. Also unlike the usual bills they would not have the strong legal protection from counterfeiting.
I don't think you can be certain offline, but it looks like the back of the card has an address where the money is stored. Presumably this will indicate if the card has been redeemed. It also lets you be sure someone didn't just print up some cards and hologram stickers themselves.
It's already an acceptable approach with other money substitutes (gift cards, pre-paid phone cards, etc), where you have to scrape off a film to get a code.
In short, bitcoin currency is inherently deflationary due to natural loss of coins. The problem, however, is mitigated by their infinite divisibility - a million years from now the whole world will only have one bit coin in operation, and everyone will operate in pico-coins. A pint of beer - 5 picocoins, hourly wage - 100 picocoins.
