Do we know enough about Casascius to trust their physical coins in the long run? Casascuius offers an attractive product, a physical coin storing a private key. From a CNET article and the website itself, we learn the company is run by


  Mike Caldwell, 2901 Little Cottonwood Road, Sandy, Utah 84092,


who appears to be a trusted member of the Bitcoin community.
They provide a digitally signed list of Bitcoin addresses and claim that this makes Mike  legally accountable. (I'm not sure how the GPG key used can be connected to a real person.)

The only form of payment, they accept directly is Bitcoin.

Such a service allows for two types of fraud:


At some point in time, they stop sending physical coins in exchange for BTC received and disappear. This is a very common risk when making payments in advance and it is particularly obvious if the form of payment is designed not to allow chargebacks.
The risk here is not different from shopping at many other businesses online. However, the relatively simple website and the connection with Bitcoin, is likely to raise alarms with customers. 
Although they claim otherwise, they could easily keep a copy of the private keys. This would allow spending the balance on all coins that have not been spent yet at some point in the future.


What should the Bitcoin community expect Casascius to do to render the scheme trustworthy?
wrt the suggestion that I put up a website with the name and address of the founder, this information has consistently been displayed on the home page since I put up the site. Agreed, there exists a theoretical possibility that I could scam and there is little anybody can do about that, even if my processes were to be audited, it's still impossible to know I didn't keep a copy somewhere at some moment someone wasn't looking.  On the other hand, I am known to care about the success of Bitcoin, and own a fairly successful payroll software business independent of Bitcoins, and (especially with my signed list of addresses) have the means to be held accountable and be ordered to pay restitution in the event of fraud. If this is unsatisfactory, then of course you should not buy the coins. I indeed hope I spur successful competition (my life career is not in making coins), this has been a neat project thus far.