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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

I have seen more than one of these "vending machines" in Dubai.

Interesting thing is that they constantly adjust the price of the gold bars as the price of gold fluctuates. I guess these machines need a permanent internet connection to receive the current gold price.

Who will be the first to do a MITM and adjust the price to 0.001? ;)

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Out of curiosity, other than owning a lump of gold, what exactly are you supposed to do with it once you have it?

Talk about how you own a lump of gold, of course.

Store as an asset?

Well, if you paid a tenth of a penny per whatever-the-unit-is, you presumably sell it for its actual current value.

You look at it.

You'd have to have quite a bit of inside info to do that & given hopefully the designers of the machine had enough forethought to not connect the thing to the open internet. To top that off they may even have programmed it to stop if the price variations get too crazy (99% drop may trigger it).

I expect that the commission they charge is fairly hefty too. They'd also need solid physical security.

These machines likely contain very small inventories, the value of their contents is almost certainly exceeded by a typical ATM.

I would think it's less traceable though, no? This is not coming from any industry knowledge, but I would think that an ATM would know the bill #s, so if you stole it, the bills would be tagged. You can always melt the gold. But this isn't based on any practical knowledge.

You're making the mistake of assuming that the people who built it are as competent as you are when you're relaxed and posting on HN, rather than being the lowest bidder and/or somebody's cousin and/or having a two-week deadline. It's probably implemented in javascript + nodejs w/mongodb.

It's probably implemented in COBOL.

One would hope.

Probably need a permanent connection of some sort to run a credit card, too.

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