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Comment by boredumb | Hacker News Reader

8 or so years ago in uptown manhattan you'd see these btc ATMs in shady bodegas that I was convinced were being used for laundering money back, unless the frequenters of the surrounding methadone clinics were more astute investors than what I assumed.

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Same thing in the UK. Groups of very suspect looking people feeding loads of cash into them in small grocery shops.

I think a lot of them actually stopped doing it because the ATMs themselves were becoming a huge crime target, with so much cash in them and not particularly hard to remove.

Would you mind describing what "very suspect people" look like?

I was likely one of them and I can confirm we were very shifty looking.

Mostly because we couldn't believe laundering money was this easy and surely the police will jump out at any moment (they never did)

Navy-blue Armani suit, garish yellow Bitcoin necktie, and a Thiel Foundation lapel pin. Beware of geeks bearing libertarian currencies.

Eh, I always assumed bitcoin ATMs just looked for the stores that do things like Western Union, lottery tickets, parcel drop-off etc - i.e. businesses who want a secondary revenue stream which gets people into the store.

Which is in fact the exact same thing that regular ATM operators do.

I thought the future was here, and it is, but for some reason it's on sale somewhere between not at all, and a 24% markup.

Apparently lucrative, or maybe not. I'm not sure how to read that if that's reflective of their costs, wishful thinking, preying on the inattentive, or all of the above.

My local bodega (Brooklyn) has one, installed in the past year IIRC. I've never seen anyone using it.

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