Bitcoin ATMs -- who are the players?

[Gabi]

I find the ATMs a good idea. They allow you to buy bitcoins very easily and without troubles. Buying them now imply using an exchange, send money to another banks, set up accounts etc etc... i am pretty sure this discourage a lot of people.

With two smart phones, easy enough to exchange cash for bitcoins/bitcoins for cash with someone. Eliminates the up-front cost of an ATM and the operational costs. Also eliminates the problem of thieves putting a skimming device on the ATM.

True but you have to find and meet someone, while with an ATM you just go and buy bitcoins...

[1714126885]

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[1714126885]

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[cruikshank]

ATMs often have fees with their use. Bitcoins are not suppose to have any fees, that is what is suppose to be superior to them above using a credit card or an ATM. At least with a person to person exchange, a fee can be waived.

[DeathAndTaxes]

ATMs often have fees with their use. Bitcoins are not suppose to have any fees, that is what is suppose to be superior to them above using a credit card or an ATM. At least with a person to person exchange, a fee can be waived.

Who says bitcoin is supposed to have no fees?  This is an unrealistic and naive goal.  People are going to build exchanges, and software, and hardware, and ATM for free.  Just for the love of their fellow man.

Mt Gox currently charges fees (so does every other exchange) so do most bitcoin pools, so do most bitcoin shopping carts.  Bitcoin isn't socialism.  The goal of bitcoin is decentralization which allows free market to compete and price products  and services without monopolies (aka VISA, paypal, WU, etc).  Bitcoin isn't going to be free.

Someday what/who do you think is going to pay for the hashing network which protects bitcoin?  Hint: TRANSACTIONS FEES!

[cm68jd]

ATMs often have fees with their use. Bitcoins are not suppose to have any fees, that is what is suppose to be superior to them above using a credit card or an ATM. At least with a person to person exchange, a fee can be waived.

Actually, bitcoins are supposed to have fees. Fees are built right into the client. Miners will reject certain transactions unless they have fees and as the bitcoin mining lottery gets halved and the exchange rate continues to go down miners will require even more fees in order to continue to secure the network. In addition, this has nothing to do with bitcoin, but a service that utilizes bitcoin, which means it is up to the business owners and the consumers to decide what is appropriate as far as fees go.

[Jonathan Ryan Owens]

Everyone,

My partner and I spent a week with Todd Bethell, developing the Bitcoin ATM platform from the ground up on a Kiosk in his garage. He's a big dreamer for sure, and is also unfortunately misguided. He had no technical understanding of how Bitcoin works, and was purely ideologically driven in regards to what he saw as the potential market size. What I saw as a prototype / proof of concept / 'cool bleeding edge, fun project', he saw as the answer to the economic ills of the world.

When we met Todd, we found his hard line Libertarian ideals endearing. When we parted ways, unpaid for services rendered, I felt differently. He'd spoken of Dustin and others as his big Bitcoin investors. Unfortunately, that money never materialized, and instead of dealing with us in an upfront and honest way, he instead insulted our work, competence, demanded that we sign a non compete agreement, and even went so far as to report me to the Bitcoin Police, while also calling me and Eric 'fraudsters' and 'scammers' to others. The offline wallet system listed on his site is my IP, as is the implementation description and backend services which we already coded for the Vanity addresses. Yeah, I'm the scammer and thief. *cough*.

So, when Todd didn't pay us, we pulled the kill switch on the software. Perhaps we should have just let him have it for free? What would you have done?

I think there is a really good lesson here for many of you in the Bitcoin community to learn. Bitcoin is very young, and the market size is nowhere near where it needs to be for brick and mortar solutions to be realistic.

Mr. Bitcoiner and others have made very valid points as to the coming obsolescence of ATMs. Bitcoin ATMs will almost certainly never find a mass market.

200 Bitcoin Kiosks @ $4000 / unit + Software, Monthly Support, Security, On Site Maintenance = Not Viable

video of the Bitcoin ATM in debug mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2tikxtviqQ

So.. You want to know why his site is dead? It's because the economic issues that the have been raised here are incredibly valid. The idea of 200 "Bitcoin ATMs" (really, Kiosks) being deployed worldwide is hilariously unrealistic and naive.

Frankly my experience with the fly-by-night operators in Bitcoin has left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I prefer to only work in a vacuum, and do my best to just keep to myself. So many of you are liars, thieves and crooks, dishonest businessmen, and frankly, just outright criminals, that it's not all that surprising that Bitcoin has been suffering from an image problem.

I'm tired of being libeled. I'm one of the few people actively working on the building blocks of the Bitcoin economy while so many others are outwardly projecting their own insecurities about themselves by way of calling others scammers and fraudsters. I have never seen such a thing anywhere else. The ratio of of Bitcoiners who have psychiatric disorders relative to the general population has got to be massive.

TL:DR

Bitcoin ATMs will never come to market. By the time Bitcoin gets to the size necessary for their viability, smartphones and other POS solutions will exist. On the surface, Bitcoin ATMs seem like a good idea, but they are financial black holes.

-Jonathan

[someotherguy]

Well said Jonathan.

[cm68jd]

I still do not understand how an ATM can be a financial blackhole. Normal ATMs make money. Why would a normal ATM that also deals with bitcoin suddenly lose money? If anything it should be more profitable than a normal ATM.

[giszmo]

Normal ATMs make money.

Opposed to this very common misunderstanding, ATMs actually *don't* print money.

[Elwar]

The best thing that a Bitcoin ATM can do is solve the fiat currency -> bitcoin problem.

Right now, you have to take your bank money and send transfer it to some third party and wait for about a week. Then your money gets sent to an exchange where you can then exchange it for Bitcoins. You can then send from there to your wallet.

With an ATM. Take your cash, insert it into the machine, transfer Bitcoin to your wallet.

MtGox makes it slightly easier though. Now you can go to a Chase bank, fill out a deposit slip with all of the right info. Deposit the money, then get the Bitcoin in your account, then you can send it to your wallet.

Though, in reality, you are basically trading currencies. If I want to trade my USD for EUR, it takes a few steps.

[danman87]

If I want to trade my USD for EUR, it takes a few steps.

Like, drive to the airport?

[cypherdoc]

Everyone,

My partner and I spent a week with Todd Bethell, developing the Bitcoin ATM platform from the ground up on a Kiosk in his garage. He's a big dreamer for sure, and is also unfortunately misguided. He had no technical understanding of how Bitcoin works, and was purely ideologically driven in regards to what he saw as the potential market size. What I saw as a prototype / proof of concept / 'cool bleeding edge, fun project', he saw as the answer to the economic ills of the world.

When we met Todd, we found his hard line Libertarian ideals endearing. When we parted ways, unpaid for services rendered, I felt differently. He'd spoken of Dustin and others as his big Bitcoin investors. Unfortunately, that money never materialized, and instead of dealing with us in an upfront and honest way, he instead insulted our work, competence, demanded that we sign a non compete agreement, and even went so far as to report me to the Bitcoin Police, while also calling me and Eric 'fraudsters' and 'scammers' to others. The offline wallet system listed on his site is my IP, as is the implementation description and backend services which we already coded for the Vanity addresses. Yeah, I'm the scammer and thief. *cough*.

So, when Todd didn't pay us, we pulled the kill switch on the software. Perhaps we should have just let him have it for free? What would you have done?

I think there is a really good lesson here for many of you in the Bitcoin community to learn. Bitcoin is very young, and the market size is nowhere near where it needs to be for brick and mortar solutions to be realistic.

Mr. Bitcoiner and others have made very valid points as to the coming obsolescence of ATMs. Bitcoin ATMs will almost certainly never find a mass market.

200 Bitcoin Kiosks @ $4000 / unit + Software, Monthly Support, Security, On Site Maintenance = Not Viable

video of the Bitcoin ATM in debug mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2tikxtviqQ

So.. You want to know why his site is dead? It's because the economic issues that the have been raised here are incredibly valid. The idea of 200 "Bitcoin ATMs" (really, Kiosks) being deployed worldwide is hilariously unrealistic and naive.

Frankly my experience with the fly-by-night operators in Bitcoin has left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I prefer to only work in a vacuum, and do my best to just keep to myself. So many of you are liars, thieves and crooks, dishonest businessmen, and frankly, just outright criminals, that it's not all that surprising that Bitcoin has been suffering from an image problem.

I'm tired of being libeled. I'm one of the few people actively working on the building blocks of the Bitcoin economy while so many others are outwardly projecting their own insecurities about themselves by way of calling others scammers and fraudsters. I have never seen such a thing anywhere else. The ratio of of Bitcoiners who have psychiatric disorders relative to the general population has got to be massive.

TL:DR

Bitcoin ATMs will never come to market. By the time Bitcoin gets to the size necessary for their viability, smartphones and other POS solutions will exist. On the surface, Bitcoin ATMs seem like a good idea, but they are financial black holes.

-Jonathan

very interesting.  i have no reason to doubt your experience here.  out of curiosity, are you positive about Bitcoin's future?  is Eric, Eric Brigham?

[saethan]

Bitcoins will always suffer from the fact you need a few confirmations to be sure your transfer is going to stay in the chain, so they are not as 'instant' as other forms of electronic payment.

Unfortunately unless you trust some central authority(as you do when you use a bank, or a credit card, or... MtGox), this delay is needed.

Also, ATMs - how many people actually use these regularly?  I'm just using my debit card to grab physical cash... okay... if I'm doing a legal transaction with that cash, it's much easier to actually -use the debit card- for that transaction. 

I use cash to like, pay the kid next door to mow my lawn.  Which if you get into the little details probably isn't actually legal. 

[Jonathan Ryan Owens]

very interesting.  i have no reason to doubt your experience here.  out of curiosity, are you positive about Bitcoin's future?  is Eric, Eric Brigham?

The implementation of Bitcoin is what I am most fascinated by. Because I came into Bitcoin as a Miner, I have a different appreciation of a unit of value. I didn't purchase my first bitcoins, I mined them. I played poker with them, and I never used MtGox until I was working on the Bitcoin ATM. In other words, though there was an abstract notion in my head about their value, based on what I read the exchange value was, I thought more about Bitcoins having a cumulative value, rather than a dollar pegged value.

So, am I positive about Bitcoin's future?

100%

Am I positive about Bitcoin currently? Why?

Yes and No. There are three main types in Bitcoin: Miners, Programmers & Speculators. Speculators have proven that they can drive the network, where Bitcoins produced are redeemable for units of Fiat. This project is the first of its kind, and will not be the last. What an exceptional experiment. Many of us have learned about Cryptography, Parallel Processing and Money Science. Freaking awesome! Many others who are here are out of work, and are dusting off useful skills that can and should be put to work in the broader workplace. What an awesome way to brush up!

I don't like the infighting, the polarized nature of this forum, and I really hope that those who are feeling paranoid thoughts, delusions of grandeur and unhealthy hatred towards Bitcoin or people in these forums, please seek help. Go outside, meet people in real life, stop feeling sorry for yourselves. STOP tying your value of your self, and your skills to the value of Bitcoin.

This is the moment in time that distinguishes the winners from the losers. Bitcoin and its variants are far from dead, and the weak hands of the main 3 spokes that support the wheel, the Miners, the Programmers and the Speculators, they are being shaken out of the tree.

ATM's will never work. I know how to make them work in a real world scenario, but it requires a larger user base. Chicken and the egg. There is no window of certainty out to 12 months with Bitcoin, so bringing in the required investment to build out is highly unlikely. It's a dangerous gamble.

There are many things that need to happen before you'll be seeing Bitcoin ATMs. It makes about as much sense as a Gold ATM.

We need to focus on POS, online merchant services, and market liquidity / exchange options before anything like the Bitcoin ATM can succeed beyond a moderately reported press release and niche market adoption. There's no money in it as an operator. I promise. Perhaps someone could sell leases for Bitcoin ATMs with software pre loaded, and could integrate a cash recycler device to lower service costs, and then perhaps they could go a step further and franchise the opportunity, and provide the required compliance officers, and AML documentation processing, you know.. back end administration.

Then go find 50 people willing to pay for their territory, and who are also willing to pay 500-750 a month to have a purpose built kiosk.

The company / group that succeeds will still be heavily subsidizing marketing and back end costs for many, many quarters to come.

-Jonathan

[cypherdoc]

very interesting.  i have no reason to doubt your experience here.  out of curiosity, are you positive about Bitcoin's future?  is Eric, Eric Brigham?

The implementation of Bitcoin is what I am most fascinated by. Because I came into Bitcoin as a Miner, I have a different appreciation of a unit of value. I didn't purchase my first bitcoins, I mined them. I played poker with them, and I never used MtGox until I was working on the Bitcoin ATM. In other words, though there was an abstract notion in my head about their value, based on what I read the exchange value was, I thought more about Bitcoins having a cumulative value, rather than a dollar pegged value.

So, am I positive about Bitcoin's future?

100%

Am I positive about Bitcoin currently? Why?

Yes and No. There are three main types in Bitcoin: Miners, Programmers & Speculators. Speculators have proven that they can drive the network, where Bitcoins produced are redeemable for units of Fiat. This project is the first of its kind, and will not be the last. What an exceptional experiment. Many of us have learned about Cryptography, Parallel Processing and Money Science. Freaking awesome! Many others who are here are out of work, and are dusting off useful skills that can and should be put to work in the broader workplace. What an awesome way to brush up!

I don't like the infighting, the polarized nature of this forum, and I really hope that those who are feeling paranoid thoughts, delusions of grandeur and unhealthy hatred towards Bitcoin or people in these forums, please seek help. Go outside, meet people in real life, stop feeling sorry for yourselves. STOP tying your value of your self, and your skills to the value of Bitcoin.

This is the moment in time that distinguishes the winners from the losers. Bitcoin and its variants are far from dead, and the weak hands of the main 3 spokes that support the wheel, the Miners, the Programmers and the Speculators, they are being shaken out of the tree.

ATM's will never work. I know how to make them work in a real world scenario, but it requires a larger user base. Chicken and the egg. There is no window of certainty out to 12 months with Bitcoin, so bringing in the required investment to build out is highly unlikely. It's a dangerous gamble.

There are many things that need to happen before you'll be seeing Bitcoin ATMs. It makes about as much sense as a Gold ATM.

We need to focus on POS, online merchant services, and market liquidity / exchange options before anything like the Bitcoin ATM can succeed beyond a moderately reported press release and niche market adoption. There's no money in it as an operator. I promise. Perhaps someone could sell leases for Bitcoin ATMs with software pre loaded, and could integrate a cash recycler device to lower service costs, and then perhaps they could go a step further and franchise the opportunity, and provide the required compliance officers, and AML documentation processing, you know.. back end administration.

Then go find 50 people willing to pay for their territory, and who are also willing to pay 500-750 a month to have a purpose built kiosk.

The company / group that succeeds will still be heavily subsidizing marketing and back end costs for many, many quarters to come.

-Jonathan

thanks Jonathan.  that was very helpful and insightful.  i had to ask b/c i saw that you were shorting BTC.

you missed a fourth category and that is true investors like myself.  i'm a non-coder but firm supporter of BTC since the Spring.  i think i understand the nexus btwn the project and the monetary system but have been surprised at the wild volatility.  i believe that we will come out of this just fine as the the wild eyed speculators are indeed shaken out.

i easily see that you are right about ATM's.  i was shocked to hear what you said about Todd Bethell.  he made it sound like he understood Bitcoin and had some sophistication regarding the technology and how it interfaces with the real monetary system.   apparently not.  too bad for him and it sounds like he  has lost alot of money.  i also think he had money at MyBitcoin which is unfortunate.  even i was smart enough to learn how to create an offline wallet and store my Bitcoins there. 

what i think we're seeing is a washout of these weak hands. long term i am very bullish and will give the project 10 yrs minimum.  if it goes to zero before then well i guess i lose big time.  but i seriously don't think so.  there's just too much here and the blockchain marches on.

best of luck in your endeavors and i look forward to the time when you stop shorting Bitcoin and go long from positive feedback.

[Jonathan Ryan Owens]

thanks Jonathan.  that was very helpful and insightful.  i had to ask b/c i saw that you were shorting BTC.

you missed a fourth category and that is true investors like myself.  i'm a non-coder but firm supporter of BTC since the Spring.  i think i understand the nexus btwn the project and the monetary system but have been surprised at the wild volatility.  i believe that we will come out of this just fine as the the wild eyed speculators are indeed shaken out.

i easily see that you are right about ATM's.  i was shocked to hear what you said about Todd Bethell.  he made it sound like he understood Bitcoin and had some sophistication regarding the technology and how it interfaces with the real monetary system.   apparently not.  too bad for him and it sounds like he  has lost alot of money.  i also think he had money at MyBitcoin which is unfortunate.  even i was smart enough to learn how to create an offline wallet and store my Bitcoins there. 

what i think we're seeing is a washout of these weak hands. long term i am very bullish and will give the project 10 yrs minimum.  if it goes to zero before then well i guess i lose big time.  but i seriously don't think so.  there's just too much here and the blockchain marches on.

best of luck in your endeavors and i look forward to the time when you stop shorting Bitcoin and go long from positive feedback.

Going short BTC is my way of helping its value go up. Again, I'm a contrarian bear. I want Bitcoin to succeed, but I also need to preserve my sanity during high volatility and negativity.

I didn't mean to say anything shocking about Mr. Bethell, really. In his defense, I think he's more sophisticated than 80%+ of the current BTC users, and I think he was trying hard to understand and learn as he went along. He's a blind bull, and the rally in July to $30+ made him a very confident one at that. Unfortunately he also fell into the same trap that many in this community have found themselves in, namely one of arrogance and delusions of grandeur. These are the weakest hands, and I have seen in the past 2 weeks that the previously bullish and overly optimistic in the community are mostly being replaced by rational actors. This is great.

I recently considered diverting some of my development resources to building and releasing an open source, native desktop application with the ActiveX control hardware integration needed to function with 80% of existing hardware bill collectors and receipt printers.

If this is of interest to any developers and hobbyists, let me know. I'll state again as fair warning: you will not get rich with a Bitcoin ATM, but you could put a business on the map, and gain some geek cred. I'd be willing to put some resources towards the effort, as long as others are actually interested.

Regards,
Jonathan

[Etlase2]

Frankly my experience with the fly-by-night operators in Bitcoin has left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I prefer to only work in a vacuum, and do my best to just keep to myself. So many of you are liars, thieves and crooks, dishonest businessmen, and frankly, just outright criminals, that it's not all that surprising that Bitcoin has been suffering from an image problem.

D'ya think that this might have something to do with how bitcoin is a pyramid-disguised currency? A large portion of the people around here are interested only in money for nothing, thanks to the O Holy Creator, He That Shall Remain Anonymous.

[Jonathan Ryan Owens]

Frankly my experience with the fly-by-night operators in Bitcoin has left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I prefer to only work in a vacuum, and do my best to just keep to myself. So many of you are liars, thieves and crooks, dishonest businessmen, and frankly, just outright criminals, that it's not all that surprising that Bitcoin has been suffering from an image problem.

D'ya think that this might have something to do with how bitcoin is a pyramid-disguised currency? A large portion of the people around here are interested only in money for nothing, thanks to the O Holy Creator, He That Shall Remain Anonymous.

It has to do with the fact that a large portion of society in general are interested only in money for nothing. Why limit your scope of opinion to Bitcoin? I've met plenty of crooks every field I've ever worked in. I will agree that early miners are a large part of why more sophisticated investors are (rightfully) reticent to use Bitcoin as a predictable store of value, where Bitcoins minted early on that are in cold storage can scalp anyone and everyone at a moments notice.

Part of my glee at seeing the price crash, and in seeing large volumes of coins coming out of cold storage, was that these coins are more and more being spread more evenly among a larger user base. This is absolutely required for Bitcoin or any other block chain cryptocurrency to succeed long term. No serious investor will consider it anything BUT a pyramid when there are a very few that control a very large (even if not actively traded / used) portion of the tradable units.

-Jonathan

[crawdaddy]

I have also worked with Mr. Bethell and have remained quite.  But, I will speak up my thoughts.  I believe it is still possible to make a profit on Bitcoin ATM, but one needs a solid business plan.  The plan presented by Mr. Bethell has some flaws, IMHO.

People sell video game machines for $10K+ and these machines profit over time.  An ATM is about $5K.  If it can pull in $15 profit a day it would take a year to pay off.  Maybe year and a half.  After that it would all be profit.  The Bitcoin ATM is more like a three year investment and you won't see profit until many years (assuming there is actually some demand which I think there is.)

It would take a lot of dedication and planning to make a successful Bitcoin ATM business.  I can see people wanting to create one for fun, like Johnathan said, for geek cred.

Mt. Gox offers deposits at Chase bank now with a little paperwork, so that is more competition for the Bitcoin ATM.

Didn't he what to provide Fiat services as well at the ATMs? If so, there is you profit. I worked at a gas station in the South while going to college and people there still use ATMs a lot, so it depends on your market area. But you would have to start with a 200 mile radius from you business location (maintenance, money transport issues, etc.) and that's it, until you reached that 200 ATM mark. After the 200 mark you would be forced to expand. I think if a business that has Bitcon/fiat accepting POS units with merchant accounts,  bitcoin ATMs (bitcoin/debt accepting ATMs) could just be a add in to a small retail shop and could be quite profitable.

I saw the flaws in Mr. Bethell's idea when i first watched the videos about the ATM. It sounded like he didn't understand that there is maintenance on these machines, among other things.

[crawdaddy]

Everyone,

My partner and I spent a week with Todd Bethell, developing the Bitcoin ATM platform from the ground up on a Kiosk in his garage. He's a big dreamer for sure, and is also unfortunately misguided. He had no technical understanding of how Bitcoin works, and was purely ideologically driven in regards to what he saw as the potential market size. What I saw as a prototype / proof of concept / 'cool bleeding edge, fun project', he saw as the answer to the economic ills of the world.

When we met Todd, we found his hard line Libertarian ideals endearing. When we parted ways, unpaid for services rendered, I felt differently. He'd spoken of Dustin and others as his big Bitcoin investors. Unfortunately, that money never materialized, and instead of dealing with us in an upfront and honest way, he instead insulted our work, competence, demanded that we sign a non compete agreement, and even went so far as to report me to the Bitcoin Police, while also calling me and Eric 'fraudsters' and 'scammers' to others. The offline wallet system listed on his site is my IP, as is the implementation description and backend services which we already coded for the Vanity addresses. Yeah, I'm the scammer and thief. *cough*.

So, when Todd didn't pay us, we pulled the kill switch on the software. Perhaps we should have just let him have it for free? What would you have done?

I think there is a really good lesson here for many of you in the Bitcoin community to learn. Bitcoin is very young, and the market size is nowhere near where it needs to be for brick and mortar solutions to be realistic.

Mr. Bitcoiner and others have made very valid points as to the coming obsolescence of ATMs. Bitcoin ATMs will almost certainly never find a mass market.

200 Bitcoin Kiosks @ $4000 / unit + Software, Monthly Support, Security, On Site Maintenance = Not Viable

video of the Bitcoin ATM in debug mode: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2tikxtviqQ

So.. You want to know why his site is dead? It's because the economic issues that the have been raised here are incredibly valid. The idea of 200 "Bitcoin ATMs" (really, Kiosks) being deployed worldwide is hilariously unrealistic and naive.

Frankly my experience with the fly-by-night operators in Bitcoin has left me with such a bad taste in my mouth that I prefer to only work in a vacuum, and do my best to just keep to myself. So many of you are liars, thieves and crooks, dishonest businessmen, and frankly, just outright criminals, that it's not all that surprising that Bitcoin has been suffering from an image problem.

I'm tired of being libeled. I'm one of the few people actively working on the building blocks of the Bitcoin economy while so many others are outwardly projecting their own insecurities about themselves by way of calling others scammers and fraudsters. I have never seen such a thing anywhere else. The ratio of of Bitcoiners who have psychiatric disorders relative to the general population has got to be massive.

TL:DR

Bitcoin ATMs will never come to market. By the time Bitcoin gets to the size necessary for their viability, smartphones and other POS solutions will exist. On the surface, Bitcoin ATMs seem like a good idea, but they are financial black holes.

-Jonathan

How far did you all get in producing the software?

[Tuxavant]

I think Bitcoin ATMs in Las Vegas strip clubs could be a hit and do a lot for the economy... And just imagine all the hot girls getting sexy QRCode tattoos on their asses. The could be the new Tramp Stamp!