Seattle, Washington. It’s the land of rain, good food, and now a two-way bitcoin ATM.
What some Northwestern news publications are calling the city’s first bitcoin ATM, city residents will be able to not only purchase bitcoin, but they’ll be able to exchange bitcoin for fiat.
Located at the Spitfire Sports Bar in Downtown Seattle, the ATM is destined to begin serving customers come 11 AM local time. Customers will have the opportunity to interact with the ATM from 11 AM to 10 PM seven days a week.
Manufactured by Las Vegas-based Robocoin, the ATM will allow for transactions up to $3,000 be conducted per day. Using biometric measures, the machine captures the identity of users to ensure they aren’t breaking daily limits.
Spitfire is owned by Jonathan Sposato, a notable investor in Seattle (with a history at Microsoft and Google, according to Union-Bulletin).
The company operating the ATM is Coinme, and according to General Manager Nick Hughes, a bitcoin ATM is the tool of choice to get people familiarized with digital currency.
“If people are going to understand what Bitcoin is, they need to touch it and feel it in a safe and secure manner,” he said to GeekWire.
According to Hughes, going the ATM route to acquire bitcoins is much better than today’s other methods:
“It’s a heck of a lot faster and safer, and more secure than utilizing some sort of exchange.”
Robocoin bitcoin ATMs continue to sprout around the world, and the first two-way bitcoin ATM to launch ever was manufactured by Robocoin. In fact, it was installed not terribly far from Seattle in a downtown Vancouver coffee shop.
Whether or not users in the city will flock to the machine is yet to be seen, but it could turn out to be an interesting experiment.
Robocoin’s first bitcoin ATM in Vancouver processed a whopping $1 million in transactions in the first month of service last year.