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The Great Robocoin Rip-off

Posted by Soulskill on from the expectation-versus-reality dept.

FhnuZoag writes: Last year, Andrew Wilkinson, founder of MetaLab, bought a Robocoin Bitcoin ATM, figuring it would be a fun little side project and a good way to help move Bitcoin forward. It did not quite turn out that way. He has now written a timeline of the 10-month, $25,000(CAD) struggle. In short: there was a massive shipping delay, a $2,000 charge to clear customs, no knowledge base, unhelpful support, and the ATM itself flat out didn't work.

5 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Robocoin has 44 operational ATMs worldwide by De+Lemming · · Score: 4, Informative

    I can't vouch for the quality of their products or service, but I know Robocoin is one of the leading Bitcoin ATM manufacturers. According to Coin ATM Radar, there currently are 44 Robocoin ATMs operational worldwide, in the United States, the UK, Canada, Spain, Japan,... Robocoin provided the very first Bitcoin ATM machine in the world, in October 2013 in Vancouver, Canada.

    They are currently ranked 2nd, after Lamassu with 90 ATMs. But the Lamassu ATMs are mostly smaller and cheaper one-way machines (cash to Bitcoin), although they do sell a two-way solution now.

    On Coin ATM Radar, a total of 267 operational Bitcoin ATMs are registered at the moment.

    1. Re:Robocoin has 44 operational ATMs worldwide by rudy_wayne · · Score: 3, Informative

      I can't vouch for the quality of their products or service, but I know Robocoin is one of the leading Bitcoin ATM manufacturers.

      According to the email exchange shown in the article, Robocoin is NOT a manufacturer, they are simply a reseller who installs their own custom software. Which may or may not be crap and which may or may not actually work.

  2. The cost of the energy. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The way bitcoin was originally designed (and should still react, barring the surging/bucking from mining vendors shoving their 'new stock' online for a couple days to 'test', before shipping them out to customers when they're no longer profitable) is to scale evenly with energy cost. So however much it would cost you to run a current gen cpu/gpu/asic is about how much energy you need to spend to generate a coin.

    When I did it with an OpenCL capable GPU a couple years back the amount coincided exactly with the calculated energy cost over the winter. The only reason it wasn't a 'waste of electricity' is because it was done during a period where it provided heat that otherwise would've been produced by a heater and thus was either 'free money' or 'free heating' depending on how you look at it.

    That said: It was back when BTC were 10 dollars apiece, the difficulty was like 3 million, and Mt Gox was still a respected industry player (haha).

    While I don't have specific numbers, I assume current-gen hardware at the current difficulty numbers probably coincides to a similiar valuation up until the point where newer energy efficient models are produced, then there's a rapid jump in profitability for a few months until saturation takes place and then back to unprofitability.

  3. Re:Cost of Production by pla · · Score: 5, Informative

    What's the energy cost to physically produce a bitcoin? Anybody know?

    With a Butterfly Labs' Monarch (700GH/s)), at a difficulty of 19,729,645,941 and a block reward of 25...

    655 kWh per BTC, on average, or roughly one third of the current USD:BTC exchange rate in power costs.

  4. Apology from CEO Jordan Kelley by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2jakg4/the_great_robocoin_ripoff_how_we_lost_25000/cla6b7d