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I believe you can already do this by using physical Bitcoins.

Those already exist: https://www.casascius.com/

It can be.

I'm waiting for a big-name, trusted bank, insurance company, or sovereign state to print "Bitcoin Certificates" that are designed to be used as spending money (i.e. not just as a stuff-in-the-mattress currency) backed by BC, similar to the Gold and Silver certificates of days gone by.

Why bother, when the actual bitcoins are both easier to transfer and easier to secure than any paper certificate? What would the selling point be?

This has been attempted before, several times, with Bitbills, Casascius coins, and even print-your-own paper wallets. While the goal is generally to enable offline person-to-person transfers, my impression is that these are used more for "cold storage" than as cash-analogues. For actually transferring funds around, even face-to-face, a smartphone app is far more convenient.

There are physical *coin* bitcoins, and currency can be either paper or coins.

What size are they...

Oh, what's that ?

You can't ?

While this ATM doesn't dispense them there are physical Bitcoins you could carry on your persons, https://www.casascius.com/

So long as they can be kept physically secure in the machine there is nothing to stop future BitCoin ATMs from being able to dispense said coins.

https://www.casascius.com/

Don't forget that you can buy a bitcoin/gold hybrid at https://www.casascius.com/.

You can get a coin that is 1 troy ounce of gold, with a 1000 BTC electronic redeemable value.

Of course, it's kinda expensive at 1415, but it sure is pretty... and liquid (financially).

It would be a lot like if I paid you in Casascius coins. You could accept them immediately as-is (trusting the hologram and the fact that you've seen me in person), or you could open them up and load their contents into the Bitcoin network before proceeding further.

BitCOINS ... ;)
https://www.casascius.com/ Physical coins backed by Bitcoin
BitBills are paper based Bitcoins: http://bitbills.com/

True but bitcoins are completely untraceable

Ok, so here's how Bitcoin works:

• Step 1. Distribute the entire transaction history to everyone in the P2P network, much like how a git repository works.
• Step 2. Have a bunch of people do lots of expensive hashing so that anyone in the P2P network can tell which "branch" of the repository is the official one. ("The branch that was the most difficult to compute" is the one that wins.)
• Step 3. To see how much money you have, look at the transaction history for the accounts that you control.

Bitcoins aren't really a thing you can have. Even the physical "bitcoins" you can buy aren't really coins. They're just private keys that are allowed to sign transactions on behalf of accounts that have a non-zero balance.

The only reason why people talk about Bitcoin as being untraceable is that anyone can create accounts, and there aren't necessarily names attached to accounts, but it would be too hard for authorities with warrants to catch you if they suspected you. The entire transaction history is still there, forever, for everyone to see!