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The island of Manhattan in New York City — populated with over 1.5 million individuals and countless more, aggressive birds that won’t hesitate to steal your lunch — has received it’s second bitcoin ATM.
Given that it’s New York City, it’s rather hard to believe it’s taken this long, and New Yorkers have the folks over at PYC to thank for the machine.
The first ATM, installed in the late summer at a jewelry store in West Village, made headlines even on major papers for the simply reason that it was the first known bitcoin ATM to hit Manhattan, but we’d expect this second launch to come with significantly less fanfare.
It’s installed at Crispín’s, a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen (10th Avenue and 52nd Street, for those in the area), which is apparently known for its homemade pasta, seafood, and other food items I don’t particularly care to list — mostly because I’m starving as I write this. I should also mention that they accept bitcoin.
A match made in Hell. Hell’s Kitchen.
Julio Cabrera of PYC says, “We’re very excited about this release. It’s never been easier to purchase bitcoin.”
Yes, indeed friends, it does seem as if it’s never easier to purchase bitcoin.
Unlike the first machine the company installed — made by Lamassu — PYC has gone with a Skyhook ATM, which boasts the same buying ability as the Lamassu at a fraction of the cost.
Project Skyhook lists their unit cost at $999.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the Skyhook’s appearance, but it’s there to do a job and not look pretty, after all. I think this might be something Skyhook addresses in future iterations.
With that said, the machine is ready to eat your fiat in exchange for digital currency, so help yourself.
Neal Palmquist 
Who is the cash in transit service that buys bitcoins from the atm owner? Or are these vending machines again?
Once people figure out that they can never get their real money back from one of these atms, then what is to stop them from getting to the front of the line and selling bitcoins to people who are behind them… at a slightly less markup than the atm owner was charging?
That is why these vending machines are always purposely placed in controlled retail environments. The atm owner has the authority to stop people from having any such private financial transactions. Bitcoin atms will never work in publicly accessible area such as a sidewalk walk up or a drive up. The number of people cutting in front of the machine to give customers a better deal would make it ineffective.
Chef Gordon should be told. If he wants this restaurant to always be filled with activity, then he needs to put it as a through the wall unit and purposely let people cut in front of his ATM to sell their bitcoins. He won’t ever make money from the bitcoin ATM, but Jake and Silent Bob will make a killing and get hungry eventually. And they will pay for their food with plenty of real cash.
Everybody knows that the massive slavery to build pyramids and the embalming of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt did not stop them from dying and did not give them any god-like immortality. But the jury is still out on people giving their money to bitcoin prophets for it to be used in the cryogenic freezing to accomplish the same result.
I’m not sure when talking about bitcoin that it is necessarily correct to free associate it with hell. Sure, nobody who knows they are going to heaven when they die will want to risk being yanked back out and placed onto earth where they could risk losing salvation again after their lifeless corpse is thawed and then is resurrected from the dead.
But if Hal Finney does come back to life in the future that means he probably can’t go straight to hell in the meantime because of the technicality: his life isn’t over, yet. So I guess his soul isn’t in heaven or hell. It is probably Hal Finney’s role in the afterlife to welcome the homeless veterans who will freeze to death this winter. We will never live to know these answers to our blasphemous questions as they were never written into the suicide cult scripture, Book of Finney in the Cold Testament.