Vancouver was the first city to welcome a Bitcoin ATM for buying and selling bitcoin.
October 28, 2013 was the day the world’s first Bitcoin ATM was installed. The installation took place in Vancouver, Canada, at the Waves Coffee Shop.
The initiative was started by Robocoin, a startup with the goal of simplifying bitcoin transactions through devices similar to banking ones. However, the path to installation was not at all simple.
John Russell, co-founder and CTO of Robocoin, identified the connection with the exchange back-end (Mt. Gox and Bitstamp) as the main obstacle. During the initial tests, a temporary outage of Bitstamp rendered the ATM temporarily unusable.
As reported by Wired, the day after the launch, the team had to deal with a series of technical issues: from the Windows operating system starting in safe mode, to malfunctions of the receipt printer, to the need to remove the plastic cover of the palm scanner.
Users had to scan the palm of their hand to be able to exchange up to 3,000 Canadian dollars in bitcoin per day. Being the world’s first ATM, several customers were faced with a still rough and not particularly intuitive interface, which highlighted the need for improvements to make the experience truly accessible to the general public.
Ironically, the first customer to use the ATM was a bank account manager, Jason Lamarche. As soon as the machine was operational, Lamarche inserted a $20 bill, receiving 0.0939877 bitcoins in return. He then used the just-purchased bitcoins to buy a vanilla latte at the Waves Coffee House, which was already accepting bitcoin payments at the time.
During the first week of operation, the ATM recorded 348 transactions and over $100,000 in trading volume.
