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The Great Robocoin Rip-off
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.
Good heavens never saw that one coming!
should of
would of
could of
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I think a general rule of thumb is that once you hit 5 digits of price, a test drive is never too much to ask.
Better would be to have the system use a cellular data network (with a VPN connection to whatever network it needed to communicate with for transaction data). That way it's isolated from the bar network *and* you don't need anything more than a power plug.
bork bork bork!
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.
That's really just a subset of an even more general rule of thumb, "a fool and his money are soon parted".
Log in or piss off.
Wow, looking at those bitcoin ATM maps (http://coinatmradar.com/), it looks like these kiosks are charging a 5.5% fee for conversion into "fiat" currency. That's a huge forex spread, and amounts to an enormous ATM fee.
One persons large spread on a conversion, is another persons bargain on laundering.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I tried to find the nearest robocoin kiosk to see if it was possible to witness one of these things in person. The nearest one is in "Los Angeles" California. More specifically it is at this Latitude and Longitude 3646'41.7"N 11925'04.6"W which is along a desolate road with no name that runs along side the King River 20 miles outside of Fresno.
I was hoping for a bar or some other urban public space.
I really don't want to run into Jordan Kelley or anyone from his company in the middle of the desert with no witnesses.
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.
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.
There will be two groups who will ridicule this guy the worst:
1) People who think everyone who buys a magazine with the word "bitcoin" deserves to be scammed because free market durp
2) Bitcoin uber-nerds who are shocked these n00bs didn't use a P2SH decentralized escrow service by manually copying and pasting the signatures
Normal people in the middle will just shrug and say "sue 'em!"
I think a general rule of thumb is that once you hit 5 digits of price, a test drive is never too much to ask.
Exactly. That's what I told my diamond guy. "Give me one that's over $9999."
Sadly, my future father in law disagreed.
Do you like it when libertarians chuckle at your "socialist paradise" when the government screws up? It's a straw man argument.
I blew $25k on a hobby and it didn't work out. LIFE IS SO HORRIBLE!!!!!11
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2jakg4/the_great_robocoin_ripoff_how_we_lost_25000/cla6b7d
Wouldn't that include, say, cars boats trains airplanes and spaceships?
I'd happily pay $2 for a spaceship, even if it ran Windows.
I'd pay more than $2 for a Tesla.
At some point YES the victim really does have to shoulder some responsibility. If I told you I was selling you a ticket to the newest hotel we just established on the moon for $2000 and you bought it then while I am scum, you have to be pretty mentally impaired to fall for that scam.
That's pretty much what's happening here. Robocoin will hardly prosper by providing a "service" like this and getting sued for breach of contract. In fact that's how the world works in general except where companies are granted special privileges by the government.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.