Todd, what ever happened to the Bitcoin ATM? I remember watching a Youtube video on it and thinking "wow! That'd be cool to use!" but then I never heard anything about it. Why did it fail?
Well, it was at the CES show in the MtGox booth. I think the part of the problem has been the failure to take advantage of marketing opportunities. As stated before, the primary difficulty was the drop in bitcoin prices below what investors agreed to liquidate their coins at. When the negotiations were taking place bitcoin was still more than $14 so setting the minimum sale price at $11 seemed safe. Then the price went to $2. I had already invested $35,000+ of my own money and was tapped out.
But none of that is relavant now that the effort is open source. There are still many viable models and opportunities for individuals who want to own their own ATM or Kiosk or use the code for any of the other good ideas such as what Zer0 says.
Todd, what ever happened to the Bitcoin ATM? I remember watching a Youtube video on it and thinking "wow! That'd be cool to use!" but then I never heard anything about it. Why did it fail?
Would be easier to approach existing currency exchange "cambios" and give them a simple system where they can buy/sell bitcoins for cash to walk ins. No multinational chains just small exchange storefronts. They already exist and have insurance, licenses and cash ready.
All you would need is some F/T traders who can idle in jabber all day and transfer coins to whatever address the customer brings in. Then no problems with wallets being hacked, these traders know what they're doing and have offline wallets. Everything is cash only, no training for the merchant they just ask for coins in chat and provide address. Merchant settles to your bank account end of day. Just need to float them coins for 24hrs. For cash out you'd have to come to some daily settle agreement with them or provide $5k cash float up front. Your site would take the coins and generate some sort of crypto signed receipt they can walk in with and cash that can't be forged, that they can somehow verify. Again, chat comes into play they can just hop on it and ask the trader 'is this legit?' and get a yes/no.
Bitinstant could probably set this up for existing businesses, though better if more decentralization like individual small bitcoin traders in each city doing this on their own instead of one giant monopoly that could be a target for authorities, fraud and whatever other problems. Then everybody in the world just goes to a local office in person and does instant cash trade the way bitcoin was meant to be no banks or holds or ach/dwolla fraud, no ID scans sitting in an insecure databse or western union nonsense. y/n?
And Rjk