WITHDRAW BITCOIN

All through 2013, Bitcoin kept breaking the wall that separates the internet from the physical world. It did it again on October 29 when the first Bitcoin ATM went live in Vancouver. The terminal, located in a coffee shop, allowed anyone to swap cash for BTC and vice versa. Models were soon being rolled out globally.

The first Bitcoin ATM was demoed at the San Jose Bitcoin conference in May 2013. Five months later, the machine made its production debut when an ATM was installed in a downtown Vancouver coffee shop. Its establishment transformed the process of acquiring cryptocurrency from a complex, multi-day affair into a two-minute transaction familiar to anyone who had ever used a bank ATM. Bitcoin was now physical and purchasable almost instantly. On its first day of operation, the ATM facilitated 81 transactions, processing over $10,000 CAD.

The timing of the ATM’s deployment was perfect. Trading at around $200 when Vancouver gained the world’s first Bitcoin ATM, BTC would skyrocket to over $1,100 within a month as demand for the cryptocurrency heated up. Incumbent solutions for purchasing BTC such as wire transfer were slow and expensive, taking up to 10 days to complete. Given the gains Bitcoin was routinely now recording on a daily basis, this wasn’t just inconvenient – it was costly.

The Bitcoin Machine

The creation of the first Bitcoin ATM was significant in a number of ways. One of the less reported milestones is that it was the first consumer-oriented mass market Bitcoin hardware. Up until now, the only physical equipment developed for bitcoiners had been early ASICs, which were targeted at miners. This was different. Not only did it make buying bitcoin easier, but the ATM made Bitcoin visible, broadcasting it to potential buyers and the curious public alike.

Credit for installing the first Bitcoin ATM goes to Bitcoiniacs, a local Canadian startup. They purchased five of the machines at around $18,000 apiece, with plans to roll them out in cities nationwide. The devices themselves were developed by Nevada’s Robocoin, whose stated mission was to make Bitcoin “truly grandma-friendly” by removing the technical barriers associated with online exchange. While it’s unknown whether any grandmas made their first crypto purchase through one of the ATMs, the machines proved a hit with existing bitcoiners.

The launch of the first Bitcoin ATM in Vancouver spawned a global industry that fundamentally changed how the public could access cryptocurrency. Within a decade, the global count of crypto ATMs had surpassed 39,000. The first U.S. machine went online in a New Mexico cigar bar in February 2014 and the country now houses nearly 88% of the world's crypto ATMs.

Despite igniting a global proliferation of crypto ATMs, however, the machines ran into the same problem that scuppered so many early Bitcoin projects: regulatory scrutiny. Lawmakers didn’t like the fact that anyone could swap dollars for BTC with no KYC – especially because many of the machines also allowed BTC to be cashed out. It was an invitation, they averred, for money laundering.

Bitcoin ATMs exist to this day, albeit with most countries now enforcing user verification to prevent anonymous purchases. At their peak between 2013 and 2015, however, they played a vital role in mainstreaming access to Bitcoin and broadcasting its existence to the world. Putting crypto ATMs on the map had effectively put Bitcoin on the map. There was no hiding it now.