OK tried it today. Sold a little less than 1 BTC. Here is what I found;
The good news is that it works, and that by itself is pretty awesome. The exchange rate/ margin is doable for occasional use. The location where the atm is hosted is brilliant, didnt know it, but its lovely internet/cafe/bistro/not sure what you have there, although one does look out of place without a laptop.
The not so good news;
First its a bit more cumbersome than I expected and than needed. First you register with your phone, confirm with an SMS code that arrives almost instantly. Fair enough, one comment perhaps is you might want to mention the phonenumber needs to be entered in international format. Selling itself is easy enough with QR code. After you sent your bitcoins, you have to wait for I believe 2 confirmations. Thats entirely reasonable, so far so good.
Once the 2 confirmations have arrived, you receive an SMS with a code and a msg that you can collect the cash. To use the code, you have to log in again with your phonenumber, which is then validated again by yet another code via SMS, you have to enter the code, then enter the code of the earlier sms to collect. That shouldnt be necessary. Just entering the code on the confirmation sms should be enough IMO.
Secondly, the atm was nearly out of cash. I hope thats not going to happen too frequently. This might partially explain my last problem; when I collected the cash, the atm spits out one note at the time, and does so reaaaly slowly. I looked like an idiot picking up a 5 euro note, waiting, a 10 euro note, waiting, another 5 euro note, waiting, over and over again with only a few 20 euro notes and no 50 (let alone 100 euro). It took forever!
For tiny amounts, who cares, but I pity the guy that collects 500 euro there!
Hi,
Thanks for reviewing our service and taking time to put it online for the Bitcoin community.
You mentioned some important things, one that it works! What counts is the user experience.
You are right in pointing out some flaws.
We totally agree that the sell process can be cumbersome and slow for large amounts.
On the day you were there, we had just had several big sales in a row. Yours sell has finally emptied the machine. You received all the bank notes that the machine was able to give (so all the 5, the 10
). We are still in the early stages of our business and have not figured out sales or buy patterns totally yet. We will load the machine with much more larger notes.
Until a few weeks ago it was two confirmations for a sale. It has been lowered to 1. You have been unlucky with the confirmation by the miners. Thats why you waited so long. We apologise.
The reason there are several codes that have to be entered for a redeem is to avoid someone coming along and punching randomly a code and collecting someones cash.
As for the location, Coffeelabs, it is pretty fashionable and laptop-oriented and now accepts payment in BTC for food and beverages!