IN THE COMING YEARS? Whoever invests $5K in the machine, and perhaps another $50K in infrastructure for the thing is looking to make money now. Given the spread that was mentioned above, there is lots of profit to be had with the thing.
That's almost certainly not true. Anyone with that much money to invest is looking to make a large profit long term, not a small profit short term.Of course, there is lots of profit to be had with the thing in the short term too, partially from being first to market and having no competition (they can charge more than market value), and partially from the fact that most of the users don't even know the regular exchange rate.
No, it's not a novelty and not for novices, its for people who have a btc wallet, btc address and QR code and cash for the smaller machine, or all of that with or without the QR code but with a full palm print for the larger machine.
If you don't have your phone you can't use the little machine.
Both of these are also untrue, at least for the machine in Boston (I don't know about any of the other ones). The people who put it in have been spending the past few days standing next to it, explaining how to use it. They were handing out paper wallets stocked with small amounts of free bitcoin, and a QR code so you can use the machine with it.If you don't have your phone you can't use the little machine.
And it's certainly not just for novices. They were impressed at the fact that I had a phone wallet, and had a backup of the wallet I use to store my savings. They're clearly not catering to power users.
The MACHINES are for people who are btc literate and btc wallets ready. A promo with great media hype and a host of people selling, discounting, explaining, and demoing the product is not how things will normally occur -- every reasonable adult knows that.
BTC is a complex currency, not to mention all of the other things one must reasonable do to safeguard their coin, if some had $1 worth of btc at the time of the promo, and went back there today in an effort to see their balance or anything else they could with the 'receipt' (paper wallet), if they were able to actually get that type of info out of the machine they would see a 30% reduction in value simply because of the market rates.
I don't know what you mean by "power users" but my point is they are SHOULD not be seeing susie-shopper as their key demographic. Their key demographic is the bitcoin savvy buyer, user, and trader who might travel miles to get a coin(s) immediately, even at that premium rate.
