Will and Norm from Tested recently tried their hand at purchasing bitcoin, and to sum it up in one short sentence: it turned out to be a disaster.
The two took to a bar in Austin, Texas at SXSW recently and started by purchasing a bitcoin from a Robocoin bitcoin ATM. As you’ll see, there are a lot of steps you need to go through to get your digital money, which to say the least, seems like a hassle.
When the two finally do get their bitcoin, it takes some time to find a vendor that will actually accept it, but hey, they managed. One taco later it was time to go back to the ATM and cash out.
Except they couldn’t.
Norm made the mistake of not including a miner fee (which is understandable because anyone unfamiliar with bitcoin probably wouldn’t either), and 24 hours later, still no cash. Cue the high blood pressure.
Really, you should watch this for yourself, because I’m genuinely interested in what you have to say about it. It’s about 15 minutes long, so you might have to sneak it into your lunch break.
If you’re interested in Norm’s post-experience write-up, you can find it here.
Ahmed 
Burpcoin 
Brian Göss 
Gjgjg 
In the future, with more adoption and regulations, this volatility of bitcoin will decrease.
Another important element is changing from USD to BTC and vice-versa: it is as if you were changing from USD to euro several times during the day. Obviously you will gain some and lose some. And a large majority of people do not change their USD to euro unless they travel. The same thing can be said about BTC: once important adoption is implemented and volatility reduced, it will become like any other currency. We will be buying stuff using only BTC, without changing it back to USD.
EPIC FAIL. Meanwhile.. wit hthe coinbase app on my phone i can buy and sell bitcoin instantly whenever i want. Why do we need atms again? That’s an old bank thing.
Usability is key…ATM designers will learn that in time. Why miners don’t understand that requiring trivial transaction fees (which currently makes up only a tiny fraction of the financial motivation to perform the service of mining) only makes the whole Bitcoin network less useful (hence less valuable) is beyond me.
This is why the btc world needs less tech savvys and more marketing, product designer types. The atms are the main public interface, they need to be iphone easy to use so joe public gets it.