As Obama Asks If He "Should Be Worried" About Bitcoin, ATMs Arrive In 5 Canadian Cities

The world's first Bitcoin ATM will be ready for use this week at a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. Created by Las Vegas based Robocoin, the new ATM in Vancouver will allow users to turn bitcoins directly into Canadian dollars, or turn Canadian dollars into bitcoins. As The Telegraph reports, the ATM first scans the user's palm to ensure security and transfers are limited to CAD$3,000 per day. Until now, the currency existed only on the web but the introduction of these ATMs brings bitcoin-as-cash usage closer.

Via CBC,

Bitcoiniacs says it has ordered five Bitcoin kiosks from a Las Vegas-based company called RoboCoin... and will be rolled out starting this week in Vancouver...

Four more kiosks will arrive in December and although their locations are not yet certain, Bitcoiniacs says it's eyeing major Canadian cities such as Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa

"Basically, it just make it easier for people to buy and sell Bitcoins and hopefully will drive the adoption of Bitcoin, and make it more accessible for people," says Mitchell Demeter, the 27-year-old owner of Bitcoiniacs. 

Currently, acquiring Bitcoins is often done through an exchange, an arduous process that requires users to jump through several hoops, including linking their bank account to the exchange and sending in paperwork to verify their identity.

The RoboCoin kiosks are expected to make the process of buying and selling Bitcoins much easier says Jordan Kelley, the company's chief executive.

"Our goal is to make Bitcoin truly grandma-friendly," says Kelley. 

Using a kiosk means you don't have to wait to verify your account on an exchange or hand cash to a stranger, says Kelley. It also makes Bitcoins more accessible to people by adding an element of legitimacy and increases liquidity in the market.  

RoboCoin plans to ship out 10 to 15 kiosks to customers before the end of the year. The first one will go to Bitcoiniacs, says Kelley.

Demeter says many Bitcoin startups are gravitating to Canada because the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada — also known as FINTRAC — aren't as strict as regulators in the U.S.

"It's a lot more open up here, that's for sure," says Demeter. 

Those last two paragraphs/comments are especially notable in light of President Obama asking Eric Schmidt if "Bitcoin is anything he has to worry about?"

Via Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Here’s a story recently related to me by a guest at a White House dinner, which included Google’s Eric Schmidt: The president, whose most important job is surely to protect the integrity of the monetary system, smugly asked Schmidt if Bitcoin, one of many growing challenges to currency hegemony, was anything he had to worry about.

- From a USA Today article titled: How CEOs are Clueless About Technology

If the above is accurate (and I have no reason to suspect it isn’t), it is priceless information on so many levels. First of all, rather than ask about Bitcoin in an inquisitive manner free of prejudice as a enlightened leader surely would, Obama is merely primatively wondering if he needs to “worry about it.”

Actually Barry, if you had any sense and foresight whatsoever you would be looking at it as a great opportunity. An opportunity for the nation to lead the way in growing the Bitcoin economy and shed the archaic, feudalistic monetary system we are currently enslaved under. However, since you work directly for the oligarch money manipulators themselevs, you are clearly and disastrously unable to see things in a more productive and beneficial way.

Second, as I highlighted earlier this year, Eric Schmidt had no clue what Bitcoin was when Julian Assange first mentioned it to him in a lengthy interview in 2011. The initial exchange went as follows:

Assange: On the publishing end, the magnet links and so on are starting to come up. There’s also a very nice little paper that I’ve seen in relation to Bitcoin, that… you know about Bitcoin?

Schmidt: No.

Assange: Okay, Bitcoin is something that evolved out of the cypherpunks a couple of years ago, and it is an alternative… it is a stateless currency.

So Obama is asking Schmidt for his advice about Bitcoin, when Schmidt had no idea what it was two years after it had been created and released into the wild. One bureaucratic control-freak asking another for advice. What could possibly go wrong?
More from the USA Today article:

The president surely believes his important expertise is in matters of policy, law and political machinations. But he is, too, the chief executive of the U.S. government, with its increasing dependence on digital performance. And, in that area, he seems a near-illiterate, or at least a big boob.

An older establishment that still regards technology as a back-office function, or infrastructure issue, or buyable skill set, vs. an emerging native digital establishment that sees technology as an end in itself, serving a customer base with ever-higher technology expectations and standards.

It is certainly a pertinent question: If the government can’t run an e-commerce website, how in the world can it process all the data that they are supposedly sweeping up to spy on outlaws and citizens?

Non-tech people, no matter their good intentions, can’t do tech, at least never as well as tech people do it. This is something ever-more evident to people steeped in daily digital life, as most Americans are. It is less clear to CEOs, many of whom are somehow still uncertain in their digital habits and reflexes.

Let’s just hope these clowns don’t grasp Bitcoin until it’s already way too late…which fortunately it may already be.

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