Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog [3],
A little over a week ago, the world’s first Bitcoin ATM was launched to much fanfare in a Vancouver coffee shop called Waves Coffee. [4]This particular machine is made by a company called Robocoin and they sell for $20,000 per unit. While I applaud the company for installing the world’s first Bitcoin ATM, I have been quite vocal in my opposition to their requirement that you use biometrics in order to access the machine (a palm scanner). I find this to be an unnecessary feature that will only serve to condition people to use biometrics for financial transactions and I view this as unacceptable.
Another company called Lamassu, Inc. [5] is also building Bitcoin ATMs and their machines do no require biometrics, so I will be watching their rollout closely.
My strongly supportive public position on Bitcoin has been made clear for well over a year now. In fact, my first lengthy article on it was in August 2012, when it was still trading around $10/btc versus $300/btc today. The article was titled: Bitcoin: A Way to Fight Back Against the Financial Terrorists? [6]
The rollout of Bitcoin ATMs is a huge positive for the network going forward. The difficulty of buying bitcoins has been a huge obstacle that has prevented more people from getting involved. These ATMs will change that paradigm entirely for the communities in which they are installed.
More from the Washington Post:
A new Bitcoin ATM in Vancouver is off to a fast start, conducting $100,000 (Canadian) worth of transactions in its first eight days of operation. That’s according to Robocoin, the firm that created the machine and hopes to see the equipment deployed in major cities around the world.
“Robocoin has finally made Bitcoin accessible,” says Jordan Kelley, the company’s CEO. Kelley says that so far approximately 80 percent of the machine’s business has been people buying Bitcoins, while the other 20 percent has been people who wanted to sell their Bitcoins for cash. Robocoin says its machine is the first Bitcoin ATM in the world.
Full article here [7].