Bitcoin ATM Makers Open Pre-Orders & Fund Initial Run Of 15 Banknote-Eating Machines
Bitcoin startup Lamassu Bitcoin Ventures, the makers of a Bitcoin ATM which promises to eat your paper (fiat) money and spit Bitcoins into your digital wallet in return, have funded their initial production run of 15 units a few hours after kicking off pre-orders (via their website) — taking the bulk of payments in Bitcoin, fittingly.
Presumably that means they’ve booked $60,000-$75,000 in sales revenue for the initial production run — based on the $4,000-$5,000 per machine price-tag they talked about at the Bitcoin London conference last month. Lamassu is not, however, confirming how much revenue they’ve generated at this point.
What’s the point of a Bitcoin ATM? The aim is to lower the barrier of entry to the digital cryptocurrency — which still very much ‘reeks of geeks’ (and investors) at this still early stage in its development – by letting people swap banknotes for Bitcoin in person. Of course there are myriad ways to do fiat-to-Bitcoin currency exchanges online but the Bitcoin ATM doesn’t require the user to sign up to an online exchange service in order to get some Bitcoin. (Albeit, users of the ATM do need to have their own Bitcoin wallet to store their exchanged BTCs).
