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ATMs That Dispense Gold Bars Coming To America
tetrahedrassface writes "As the US economic woes continue unabated, a German company is bringing gold-bearing ATMs to Mainstreet America. The machines accept credit cards, and will dispense 1 gram, 5 gram, 10 gram and 1 ounce units, as well as various gold coins. The company hopes to install 35 bullion machines in the United States this year, and will hopefully have several hundred up and running by next year. The machines will be decorated like giant gold ingots and be over two meters tall. Physical gold has both pros and cons, but from a safety standpoint would it be fine to have a couple of ounces in your pocket while walking around the mall? The giant, gold-dispensing ATMs will monitor the market conditions for gold every 10 minutes in order to reflect spot price changes as they occur." We already covered similar machines installed in travel hubs across Germany.
Meanwhile, Slashdot is bringing apostrophe abuse to America.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It would be nice to not have to haul that entire bag of 2,000 coins back to town. I might run into a random encounter before then...
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
I bet Glenn Beck is pissed about this.
Living With a Nerd
will we win a trip to Glenn Beck's magical crazy factory?
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
It's spelt billion. ;)
And 35 billion ATMs is rather much for a start-up, and more than current market demand...
oh gawd, there will be more of these than McDonalds and Starbucks...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"... will monitor the market conditions for gold every 10 minutes in order to reflect spot price changes as they occur... " So... all I have to do is hack the market price calculations, buy my gold for $10.00 an ounce, then sell it for $300 an ounce. I give these guys less than a year before they're hacked into bankruptcy. Incidentally, I thought when we went off the gold standard (and silver standard) that this sort of thing actually became illegal. Granted, I could be wrong... I haven't had my morning coffee yet...
Seriously, why? If people want to invest in gold, they're generally going to buy it in larger lots than this. What's the point of selling gold in a vending machine when no one is going to take a gold coin as currency? This seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Not to mention I fully expect these to become big, fat targets for thieves...
I've been playing Red Dead Redemption a lot. I've been dying for a chance to go to the store and barter for what I want with furs and gold pieces. I want to make the angry high school kid at Sonic take out his scales to measure the cost of my chili dog.
To put that in perspective, that's over a hundred machines per person, or 3.3 machines per square foot of land. Talk about agressive expansion!
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
how much is "35 bullion"
Probably more than three Brazilian. (If you thought it was a typo for billion, see bulk precious metal.)
What do you mean "remember". Every day I drive past several dozen outfits that do this, complete with people holding giant signs saying "we buy gold" and pointing to local stores that do this. That business is still booming (at least enough to pay people to stand outside on the street hawking it). Radio and TV ads are also saturated with ads for this.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
They did compensate people for seized gold. They just promptly devalued the dollars they paid for them with.
And considering the massive failure that was the last gold seizure (they only got 500 tons total), and the fact that we aren't on a gold standard, so they can devalue the dollar just fine as is, there is no need and little likelihood of future seizure of gold. Your retirement accounts will probably be nationalized long before your gold is seized.
Allocating some portion of your assets to physical gold and silver is simply prudent, not useless.
How is it diffferent from a regular ATM, apart from the loot being less liquid?
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
The demand for bouillon has cubed.
I live in a state with a large number of concealed carry permits. Forceful robberies are becoming less common.
I'm guessing golds not as easy to get rid of as it seems. Chances are these guys stockpiled tons of gold while the price was closer to $400 an ounce than $1300 an ounce and now they're having a tough time getting rid of it all, so they're trying to dime-bag it out to the public.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Just hack into the machine with an axe and take the gold.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Who in their right mind would buy gold right now? It recently passed the $1300 mark and may climb higher, but historical trends indicate that it is in a major spiking period. "What goes up must come down," doesn't only apply to gravity. Buying during a spike like the current one will likely result in your investment going nowhere but down (which is why the commercials want you to buy RIGHT now) in the short-middle term with a chance of breaking even, or even making a modest gain in the long term where other investments would have yielded more over the same time period. Smart investors bought gold 10 years ago while the economy was giddy with the .com bubble and all the money was flowing in to Internet business ventures causing gold to be valued at a substantial low. That was the time to buy gold. Gold is now going for a premium due to a decade that has basically been economically volatile, a very recent and lingering recession and the increased use of gold as an industrial metal (which increases gold's value, but also makes it more volatile by tying demand to an industry). The wolves are currently out to prey on the fears of the ignorant; cue goofy commercials saying, "Invest in gold right now!!!" and bullion ATMs. Don't be ignorant. Don't buy gold now.
Not very, but some ATMs will ink the cash if they detect a theft
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...I'm not interested.
All the goldbugs keep telling me that gold is money, regardless of what economists say or what governments decree. So if gold is money, why won't these machines work either way?
Your choice, put in fiat money and get a gold bar, or put in a gold bar and get some crisp green U. S. of A. "Cyberbit Certificates" (or whatever it is that backs the currency nowadays).
I'm sure the technical problems could be solved--it only accepts gold bars slabbed in polycarbonate with a barcode on them, or something. Methinks the real reason is that it would exposed the bid/asked spread.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Gold is only useful if you can hang on to it and survive the years between total collapse and the rebuilding of a new world.
Generally, gold is seized by whatever autocrats and strong-men are vying for power in the interim. In any case, during the hungry years, nobody has any use for gold.
But what's interesting this time around is that we're entering an age where canned goods are stable and good for years. We've never been through a societal collapse which has had access to high-quality, preserved goods.
Whatever. Skill sets are more important in the long run. Can you farm or make useful things? What value do you personally hold? Do people like you?
-FL
Exactly.
Don't be dumb and buy anything when it is near historically-high levels. You'll only be the "greater fool" that allows those people who bought near the lows and rode the price up to cash out just before the price collapses.
Except that the dispenser most likely calculates the price as market price + obscene markup. You'd have to cause a huge spike in the market and then employ a gang to simultaneously buy up gold from all the ATMs at the cheaper price and somehow prolong the spike long enough to sell your bullion at the raised price in order to benefit.
I think it would be easier to hire yourself a commodity trader to do all of the above and forget about the ATM entirely.
So, is my bank card going to process this as just another transaction or am going to be hit with a "gold advance fee", usurious interest rates, and an "alternative currency transaction fee"?
You have an awesome UID.
Gold is useful if the currency of your country collapses in value prior to your purchase and the world economy is still strong enough to buy your gold.
Economic collapse is not an all-or-nothing event, sometimes the economy in a limited number of countries collapses. An example of this would be Argentina in 1999.
Certainly that's common sense advice, but if you'd bought gold at the historically high level of $1000/oz last year, you'd be doing quite well now.
Sometimes prices really aren't cyclical, and sometimes the cycles are quite long.
That said, I'm not buying gold. And I certainly see no reason for gold prices not to be cyclical, aside from a possible impending total crash of the world's economies. In which case gold will go up a lot more shortly before euros and dollars become worthless -- but shortly thereafter, you'll be wishing you bought food and ammo instead, and if your gold was on paper rather than holding up your mattress, you won't have it anymore anyway.
I would guess that "I shot my friend Timmy with daddy's gun" incidents are down, now that daddy's gun spends more time in his waistband and less time in the drawer with his special balloons. I would like to know if there's an increase of "Daddy shot himself in the jimmy, now there won't be any more Timmys."
Speaking on which, who even buys physical gold at market prices?
If it's worth 1300$/ounce on the market, who will offer you that for each bar you have stockpiled?
The jewelry store? Doubt it.
Cash 4 Gold? Lolz
Put it on Craigslist? Someone's getting robbed...
~Syberz
If we're going mad max, farming is not where the money is. Subsistence is important, but you can always *trade* for food. Which is where gold comes in, as a near-universal currency. If you have enough of it, you can manipulate local markets to your benefit.
But anyway, the people who make out best in a mad max situation will be the merchants. Being able to supply many people with what *they* need is way more profitable than just being able to supply yourself (and family) with what *you* need for baseline subsistence.
So I say, rather than hoard gold or learn to farm, hoard farming tools and steel knives. And guns and ammo. And fuel. But don't neglect the high-profit luxury items and their inputs... someone needs to supply (at a profit) the local warlords and their mistresses. Hoard silk. Hoard glassware. Hoard dyes. Oh, and don't forget to make sure you have the resources to employ heavies to keep those warlords from taking your stuff for free.
And while you're at it, you might as well just become one of those warlords, and synergistically apply your brutal local enforcement methods to ensuring you are the *only* supplier of durable goods in your area. Then you can make sure to maximize your profits.
Wait, sorry, did I get off track with a libertarian fantasy?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
What I mean is they claim that the US dollar is going to become worthless, that only gold will hold any value... Yet they are willing to take your worthless US dollars in large amounts and sell you valuable gold for them. That tells you something, specifically that they are full of shit.
If I honestly believed gold would be the only worthwhile currency I sure as hell wouldn't give you any for dollars.
They are just playing in to a craze they know to be false and, as you said, this is an ultimate form of it. These things allow people to purchase with nothing more than a credit card, and do so at a massive price premium.
If they had had this vending machine technology in the 1920s, they would have been rolling out stock certificate vending machines in 1929.
Gold does not pay dividends. Gold does not have buy-backs. Gold can't be rented out for cash flow. It is traded purely on speculation. And like all speculative bubbles, it will crash. If history is any guide, the crash will come shortly after the mainstream press starts highlighting it, and the common schmucks start buying in.
Fox News is our mainstream press. Vending machines with 1g pellets make it available to those schmucks.
In the next year or two, I expect gold to get cut in half. It could rip before the tear, so I have closed all my long and short positions in the stuff. Stay the hell away from it: that's my advice.
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