11 Mar 2014 / ARS Technica – This week, I bought my first bitcoin. Actually, it wasn’t really a “bitcoin” but a tiny fraction of one. At Boston’s South Station, I inserted a dollar bill into one of the country’s only Bitcoin ATMs. In return, I received 0.0014 bitcoins, though it’s preferable to say that I received “1.4 milliBits.”
“You’re now a bitcoiner,” Chris Yim, co-founder of Liberty Bitcoin, told me.
Yim and his business partner, Kyle Powers, put their first Bitcoin machine inside the station, near the door out to train track #6. They man the machine nearly every day for varying hours, which they publish on their site before the start of each week. While money is locked inside the machine, someone could pick the box up and take it if it was left unattended. Yim said they are working on finding a way to secure the machine and leave it open 24 hours a day.
I visited the machine twice last week. It was never mobbed, but Yim and Powers got a visitor every few minutes or so. One Google Glass-wearing man named Brian, who calls himself the “hot dog king of Martha’s Vineyard,” stuffed a bunch of 10- and 20-dollar bills into the machine to convert them into bitcoins.
When I asked Brian what he uses them for, he said, “Right now I use Bitcoin to dream. And it’s better than a penny for your thoughts. You get better dreams.” When Brian’s business, Dinghy Dogs, opens up again this summer, he said he hopes to accept bitcoins as payments for the snacks….. Read more
Written and photo by: Jon Brodkin
