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Comment by cstrat | Hacker News Reader

wow that sounds like a horrible experience! it is unfortunate that you got stung like that.

out of interest, what was the expected ROI? I mean, you sunk $25K into it. even if you were charging 5% fees - you would need half a million in transactions to break even, and that isn't including the monthly rental fee for the location.

is there really that big of a demand for BTC in a pub?

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Eh, I think it's going to draw people to the pub more than anything else. And if you're a bitcoin evangelist, I could understand sinking your disposable income into a cool thing that might get more people into the currency. Current BTC owners/speculators only stand to profit from userbase growth because the currency growth rate is fixed or very controlled if I understand the system correctly. Probably wouldn't make 25k back, but it softens the blow a bit.

As a side note, I just realized BTC may become a really good existence proof for Piketty's r > g proposition, though one probably can't extend that idea out to economics in general because bitcoin is so weird.

I am not saying that there would be a lucrative ROI, but if you expect bitcoin to rise sharply it is a good way to trade cash en masse for bitcoins. So you would (most likely) be outputting heaps of cash and receiving bitcoins in the process. Between fees and currency appreciation you could probably make your money back and have a fun experience. That is, unless a completely unorganized company opperates their business in a cartoonishly unprofessional manner, and your ATM arrives 3-4 months late and broken...

See the email from Jordan on August 27, 2014--he claims "average income is ~$2300/month". Given the source that's probably a best case scenario.

Yeah I saw that but I am sure they did their own figures rather than listen to what the vendor was saying others were netting.

I think the idea is that there's demand for cash at a pub, but I also don't see how you'd reasonably expect to break even with this setup.

Ah yeah thats right, when I read the emails, it read more like an ATM that accepted deposits (there were currency scanning issues attributed to the polymer notes) rather than cashing out. I guess it would work both ways.

bitcoin appreciation I think. They essentially buy low and include steep transaction fees, which I think are warranted for how convenient this would be, and then you hold the currency if you are speculating.

In Canada we can't get Bitcoin as easily as in the US and getting cash from Bitcoin isn't easy either. There's a big demand for BTC, the pub has probably not much to do with the choice (but it could easily become a way to attract customers).

I would guess the demand would be created to a certain extent. A single data point, but I travelled to Tokyo from another part of Japan to visit the only BTC ATM in Japan, so there may be a novelty factor involved for other people too.

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