Originally published at: Walmart sells Bitcoin now | Boing Boing
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Get a bitcoin gift card for your grandma so she can pay off the ransomware, so she can start seeing her grandson’s pictures on the Facebook again
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If we can enable the yokels to get their meth on the dark web, maybe they won’t make it in our bathrooms.
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I’m not all that clear why this is much in the way of news. A couple supermarkets by me had these for a while, and I’m not so sure it’s much to do with Walmart. I think CoinStar is just rotating things through different places to see if it works anywhere.
It’s just something they added to existing CoinStar coin counting machines, and you can’t even convert your coins to innernets funny money. You have to insert bills separately.
It’s really kinda weird. The big move is a red paper tag hanging off the side of the CoinStar machine what says “Now Buy Bitcoin at this Kiosk”.
I don’t imagine this will last all that long. They seem to appear in one chain location as fast as they disappear from the last one. As of right now I think they’re all gone, but I’ve seen them in 3 different supermarkets and a couple of movie theaters. Never in locations of 2 companies at the same time.
So I’d imagine the “pilot program” doesn’t get enough actual use to keep it around.
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I think my local Safeway (Virginia) has a bitcoin enabled Coinstar.
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Still gotta make it somewhere. You’re just gonna get yokels selling it on the darkweb.
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Following the standard pattern I’m assuming /r/bitcoin brigaded Coinstar with requests to support Bitcoin because that would be Good For Bitcoin™, then in a year or two Coinstar will announce they are dropping Bitcoin support due hardly anyone actually using it, at which point /r/bitcoin will brigade Coinstar with death threats (but also, here’s how Coinstar dropping support for bitcoin is hactually Good For Bitcoin™…)
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This only goes to prove that the ongoing quest to find bigger suckers is still ongoing.
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I think it’s more likely CoinMe, who it’s tied to, is paying CoinStar to feature their services.
Similar to the way you can get Amazon and iTunes gift cards through Coinstar. You basically don’t pay CoinStar’s vig if you select the gift card option, because whatever company it is pays them instead.
But since Bitcoin is A) financial services B) dodgy as hell they probably need to keep it separate. I’d put money on the original plan having been to allow redeeming change jars for Bitcoin. The one’s I’ve seen don’t. They require you to insert bills separately.
A lot of these machines already had bill slots, to allow purchase of those gift cards. So really this amounts to adding a menu option that’s weirdly cut off from the coin county bits.
The machines dispense Bitcoin into a wallet account the user creates at Coinme. Given the history of online Bitcoin storage vendors (notably Mt. Gox, but there are several other prominent examples), and that Bitcoin can be untraceably stolen, you have to wonder how secure that is.
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Next up for Wally World is selling you “breathable o2”, won’t surprise me one bitcoin.
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