Currently sitting in Room 77, a bar in Berlin that accepts bitcoin for payment - tonight's burgers and beers will be paid for with BTC. They just installed a Lamassu BTC ATM about an hour ago - will be buying some BTC later to road test it. Woo!
I was in london last week and dissapointed I missed andreas antonopoulos by a few days. Europe.... yet another painful reminder of how isolated Australia is. For some reason I am thinking of madagascar.
Yeah I was talking to Joerg while he was making that Reddit post The "thanks for the gold" comment was because I sold him a half sovereign for some euros when I ran out of folding cash after using the ATM to buy some bitcoin (only bought it 3 hours earlier, who says gold isn't liquid) - think I was #4 to use it. Got a couple of free Bitcoin magazines off him, and may be heading back tomorrow night when they have the launch party for the ATM. So - the mechanics of it. Push the start button, wait for Joerg to come back over when the machine has a hiccup and falls off the wireless network, try again, push the start button, scan my blockchain app wallet address on my phone, insert 100 note, 0.143 BTC appear almost instantly in my phone app. Apart from the wireless networking issue (the machine had literally only been installed an hour or so earlier), it was ridiculously easy. I was warned that the machine was currently hardwired to use the MtGox rate. Later in the evening (3 burgers and 13 beers later, we shouted one of the guys on the Reddit thread a few beers), I paid the tab in BTC - the barman used an app on his tablet to enter the tab (70.10), and it displayed a barcode for 0.1117 BTC - I scanned it with the blockchain app, hit send, within a second a confirmation appeared on the tablet of the payment, all done. Took longer to add up the tab then to use the app to pay, and after drinking 4 pints of Newcastle brown (had to make it a real world test!), payment was still a doddle, and much simpler than trying to work out the bloody euro coins which all look the same even when sober. Worked out there was about a 10% premium for paying in BTC if purchased on the spot using the ATM, but it was more of a demonstration exercise for me than worrying about another 7-8 on the bill (food is cheap here anyway - same food/drink in Melbourne would probably cost $180, not $105). Obviously it wouldn't make sense to buy BTC from the ATM just to pay the bill, but if I had used BTC already in my hot wallet, it would have been a ridiculously easy transaction using non-govt fiat currency.
Want back tonight to sample the pizzas - paid with BTC again. All of the staff know how to do it, and the impressive thing was it just works.
Quick, buy up all the burgers before the tumble, at least burgers have an intrinsic value because it costs money to produce them so they will never be worth nothing (Unless you are at MacDonalds)
Sounds like you had a wonderful experience with the ATM. They have installed their machine in other cities too
I'm heart broken over the 30 of extra BTC I bought - oh wait, that's right, I bought pizza with it. Something about broken clocks...
WTF? It's a thread about a real world experience on using BTC in daily transactions, it had nothing to do with price predictions or being a perma-bull on prices, you pop your head in about a call you made that was over two weeks late - are you suggesting you had inside information on the blockchain app being withdrawn from the iTunes Store and about MtGox suspending withdrawals? Seriously mate, bitcoin *regularly* has big price dumps - one comes along two weeks late for your earlier prediction, and you want to take credit for calling it? As I alluded to earlier, even broken clocks are right twice a day.
