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.

Comments

A bitcoin product was a scam?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good heavens never saw that one coming!

Re:Serveds him right for being a hipster twat

[i kan reed]

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.

Robocoin has 44 operational ATMs worldwide

[De Lemming]

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.

Re:Robocoin has 44 operational ATMs worldwide

[rudy_wayne]

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.

Re:Serveds him right for being a hipster twat

[c]

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.

That's really just a subset of an even more general rule of thumb, "a fool and his money are soon parted".

Lowest cost laundering

[Overzeetop]

One persons large spread on a conversion, is another persons bargain on laundering.

3646'41.7"N 11925'04.6"W

[TsuruchiBrian]

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.

Re:Cost of Production

[pla]

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.

Re:The inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

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!"

Re:Always a chuckle

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you like it when libertarians chuckle at your "socialist paradise" when the government screws up? It's a straw man argument.

Apology from CEO Jordan Kelley

[Anonymous Coward]

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