Worlds First BITCOIN ATM Opens in Vancouver Canada - Is CryptoCurrency the Future Currency?
It
was the machine face that launched a thousand articles. News of the
world's first real Bitcoin ATM being installed in a coffee shop in
Vancouver, Canada on Tuesday set the media afire, with stories published
across the globe. Whether related or not, in the day after the CND$ BTC
machine went live, "Bitcoin" became the second most read article on
Wikipedia, after "Halloween."
Bitcoiniacs, which bought the
$18,500 machine from Reno, Nevada-based Robocoin. While most of that is
people buying Bitcoins, $6,000 worth of Bitcoins have been traded for
Canadian cash. Demeter says he's planning to install four more Bitcoin
ATMs around Canada.
Financial regulators have told him they're
not interested in his ATM as Canada doesn't regard Bitcoin as a
currency. The machine's only nod toward the law is a palm scanner to
ensure that no one palm exchanges more than $3,000 per day, per a
federal requirement intended to prevent money laundering.
But why
is the world so excited about this machine? And why would anyone use
it? The whole financial point of the peer-to-peer, decentralized
currency is to make online money transmission easy and transaction-fee
free. Though the machine makes a near instant exchange taking less than a
minute reports Wired says there is a 3% fee to change money using the
machine, making it pricier than most online exchanges. San
Francisco-based Coinbase charges a 1% fee to change money to Bitcoin.
Canadian Virtual Exchange has fees from .5% to 1.5%.
"Why trundle
down to a regular ATM to get bills to stuff into the Bitcoin ATM, when
you could do the same transaction on your couch pay fewer fees?" writes
Jeff John Roberts at Gigaom.
While the machine does facilitate
anonymity by allowing you to convert directly from cash to Bitcoin
without attaching a bank account or identity credentials as you must
with Bitcoin exchanges like Coinbase or, now, Mt. Gox have to scan a
palm, leaving some identifying biometric information behind. Though part
of the reason a palm was chosen is that it's a biometric not often used
unless you're taking the GMAT.
There was a race on to be the
first to develop a Bitcoin ATM, with Robocoin primarily competing with
New Hampshire-based Lamassu and BitcoinATM. Bitcoiniacs chose Robocoin
because "they're the only ones that have a functioning product," says
Demeter. "Everyone's talking about it but no one had anything ready."
Despite
the fact that the machine doesn't make much sense economically, I
believe it got widespread coverage because of people's fascination with
Bitcoin in the real world. People have trouble grasping the "mining" and
cryptography and peer-to-peer network stuff, but an ATM that you put
money into that shoots a Bitcoin address out? That's easily grasped. to
digital forms of money. criminal activity.
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2014 agenda nwo
The two Senate hearings -- the first to focus on
bitcoin -- are likely to examine how regulators are responding to the
new forms of payment, the aides said. Potential points of discussion
include how financial-industry regulators will watch over investment in
the new currencies and how virtual currencies might impede tax
collection or facilitate trade in illegal products out of the sight of
law enforcement. online drug marketplace Silk Road.
Bitcoin,
which allows users to conduct online transactions while obscuring their
identities, was the only currency accepted on Silk Road. Law enforcement
officials arrested the site's alleged proprietor, Ross Ulbricht,
earlier this month, and have shuttered the operation.
Ulbricht
faces a potentially lengthy prison sentence for charges ranging from
narcotics trafficking to computer hacking to money laundering. Federal
officials have now seized over $33.6 million worth of bitcoins in
connection with the case.