Gadgetory

I'm Adrian Jeffers with the verge and I'm here at CES with Zach Harvey who is the CEO of Lama su incorporated we're here with what's being called the Bitcoin ATM but it's not exactly an ATM what is it it's more of a Bitcoin vending machine in a lot of ways but it really depends what you consider an ATM I mean if it's a Bitcoin ATM then maybe it's a completely different creature than an ATM a standard ATM because what you want to get out of this machine is Bitcoin that's that point of it so when you go to a standard ATM you go and you put in your debit card or bank card and you want to get the cash and in our machine you want to get rid of the cash and you want it right so this machine I can put US dollars in here and it will give me Bitcoin right Wow exactly okay so that this is crazy because one of the problems with Bitcoin is how hard it is to actually get your hands on some Bitcoin would you say this is one of the easiest ways to actually buy bit correct well we designed it to be the easiest way to get Bitcoin so we put a lot of thought of how to make it as accessible as possible make it as simple as possible and we developed this machine from from the ground up to make it super simple so it really is three steps you just scan in your QR code so the Machine knows where to send the Bitcoin if you put in your cash and you press send and then they appear in your phone got it and then three months later you're a millionaire well yeah exactly that's what to go on so far what is the price of Bitcoin right now well right now the price of Bitcoin is about 950 okay and we're looking at this on the machine here so right so when it says our current Bitcoin prices this would be the price of whatever the operator is charging okay so the price and the operator I Sofia he could be taking a small percentage on top of that for the convenience fee I see any operator is the corner store board bodega or wherever it is that has installed the bitcoins machine just like an ATM bought the Machine and installed it and then he gets the cash and then he sends his bitcoins or connects to an exchange for him and you guys have actually sold these they're placed how many have you sold well we've sold over 130 so far and they're just starting to go live so we have one in Helsinki Finland in a record store in a train in the largest train station we have them in Bratislava Slovakia Melbourne Australia and then we're going to have a bunch of them in Canada us Australia I love Europe Japan China Korea Stan Wow um right any in Vegas not that not yet hopefully maybe the coin slot machine would be better for Vegas maybe this time next year yeah it'll be all around here strip will be filled with Bitcoin machines so pretty soon people will be able to actually go to those machines in those locations well they already are wherever they're live people can just go there but some of them are live already right the ones in finland and slovakia and australia are alive and in the coming weeks a lot more will start going live i think they'll really start popping up kind of like mushrooms all over and by spring when all of the 130 plus machines get out there that's when it'll be really be exciting for us will know that in in lots of major cities and some less major cities people just be able to go and get bitcoin immediately anywhere at the mall exactly what we have had some malls contact us okay so that would be interesting in different countries teens buying bitcoin well they can I mean they can take their allowance money and put in five bucks and use its patents online I think that's a great use of your Lowenstein's so let's talk about the hardware a little bit how much does this thing weigh well this thing weighs about 110 pounds 45 kilos they're made in Portugal so that's how they're we measure them okay it's a lot heavier than our prototype because our prototype didn't have the interior vault okay and once we install the interior ultimate everything a lot heavier because that's six millimeter armored Swedish steel that we chose for for the protection of the of the cache itself so that made the machine a lot heavier we also made the steel itself thicker on the machine so that's a lot of stuff after we first presented the machine in San Jose we kind of went back to the drawing board event and said it's going to be installed everywhere we have to make sure that these machines are extremely robust that they're over engineered for smash-and-grab group and even basically as secures an ATM the standard ATM would be and I think we feel pretty comfortable about that right now and San Jose that was the Bitcoin conference in right it was Nate me okay things happened really fast in a Bitcoin world okay so this thing has been out for a while but it's just now going live right um well that was our prototype so it wasn't actually out there yet we only started accepting pre-orders in August and that's when we had finished this design so we we felt good about this design we knew that we could manufacture it in a timely manner that's when we started accepting pre-orders that was in August and we've already shipped out I would say about fifteen and another almost thirty are going out next week cool and so the other thing that strikes me about this is that it is it looks nice like a lot of Bitcoin services and products put designs secondary that's just the nature of the community people are a lot more engineering and not as designing and this is like very sleek looking and the the interface is nice and you guys are actually still working on the software you said you just push an update for it right well right we're always improving the software this is still an early stage of the software and there are always things to improve and added functionality and new ideas that we have that we really want to implement so we're always changing that and it's something that's really easy with this machine to just either push updates or have people download them and so as Bitcoin gains more adoption I mean the price has been going crazy it's been all over the mainstream news it's been on CNN CNBC you've probably done some interviews I know you did with Bloomberg News like mm-hmm you've probably done interviews with weddings right main networks um it seems like usability is an important an important thing to get right if it's ever going to go to really be something that most people use oh absolutely I understand right and I think there are some services that are doing a really great job of that like bid pay that we use that make it really easy for for merchants to use Bitcoin and makes it really easy for us to sign up armor to the suppliers that we work with a coin we pay ninety percent of our suppliers with Bitcoin right and we do that because using hey we just signed them up all to bitpay they're like I don't know Bitcoin is it's like unless your Fitbit paid bid pay is a service that makes it incredibly easy for a merchant to accept Bitcoin without having to deal with it if he doesn't want to and then if he wants to only deal with 10% of it like that 10% in Bitcoin and 90% directly and encash to his bank account you can do that as well so even people that are a little concerned about Bitcoin or holding it or don't know where to store it if we tell them listen we really prefer to pay with Bitcoin but it will go directly to your bank account and they're you know it's hard for them to say no to that when they pay less than wires or credit cards we even signed up the manufacturer of our bill validators which are a huge publicly traded company in Japan and we signed them up to bid pay and that that makes life a lot easier for us because we could just pay everyone in Bitcoin right and we accept our mission our machine using good pay for Bitcoin great um so in order to do a demonstration we convinced our director editor John Logue marcinho to invest $2 in this exciting new virtual currency maybe we should say what bitcoin is to you what's your favorite way of explaining Bitcoin I have my own way which I repeat in every single one of my articles but how do you explain it well I think the easiest way to explain it for people in two words is internet money because people kind of understand that you know when they had letters back in the day and you had to write them on paper and put them in an envelope and send them out that was and now you have emails and it's just Internet kind of letters that it's immediate and the same thing with Bitcoin it's you kind of get rid of all the the middlemen and everything around and it just makes it really simple to send money anywhere from one person to another there you go all right so John is going to invest two dollars in Bitcoin and so can you walk us through that we also have his phone here can you walk us through the Bitcoin ATM machine yes all right thank you so the first thing is we press Start and we scan in the Bitcoin address to the machine and now we have his address here mm-hmm which now everyone can send him money great we're doing two dollars one day so how many how many bitcoins is it so this is 2.0 seven million Bitcoin okay that's how much you're going to get for your crew two dollars at the current rate of nine five 4.76 right but that's going to double by the end of next week so I'll have four dollars and whatever ready if you'd like you can send the bitcoins okay I'm sending bitcoins John all right it says your bitcoins are on their way and how long does this usually take that that's done it's done all right if you want to verify it you can go to back to the phone do you see a little green thing that says yep it says receiving 2.0 six nine nine nine milli BTC that's it they're on their way I'm gonna show that great alright well that was the bitcoin machine also commonly called the Bitcoin ATM machine thank you so much for stopping by all right thank you