@morantis
Just noticed this thread. Here is what I would throw into the idea mill. I am sure someone has thought of this before, but I have never seen it written about.
They have these "CoinStar" machines everywhere where you can get rid of your piles of change, and convert them into gift cards for merchants, or coupons. It would be great to use this vast infrastructure to convert all this change into btc paper wallets.
I'm sure this would be already happening except for the regulatory issues involved.
Sorry, it has been a bust few weeks. I bet that CoinStar itself is working on it. That is not to say that it is not a great idea. They have some new machines out from last year that I have yet to see surface near me. I know they added support for some gift cards and other things.
The concept itself would not be too hard, just the matter of making it attractive and secure. Really feeding the results from a coin counter to a small PC is pretty easy and the BTC also not hard. Dealing with constructing a secure machine and a machine that looks good is harder. I would imagine that you could even use a mobile hot spot for the internet, most database functions and BTC wallet functions should be minimal on bandwidth as long as you dealt with the blockchain and set up on a different network.
Good idea, check the regs and get back to me. It reminds me of an arcade box we built years ago using an old Galaga box, a laptop, some goodies and the MAME program.