Coinstar Machines Selling Bitcoin is Probably the Biggest News in the History of Bitcoin

In the United States presently there are approx. 2400 Bitcoin ATMs. The average sales volume is 30k per month per machine. So 72 million dollars a month.

Coinstar has over 20k machines in 4 countries. Most of the machines are in the United States. The key to why this news is enormous is where those machines are located. A typical Bitcoin atm is located in low to average foot traffic areas. The typical Coinstar machine is located inside of a WALMART. Super high traffic and ultra-convenient for the majority of the United States population. They don't have to go find some machine in a comic book shop somewhere. It's where they buy their groceries every week. It's everywhere they ARE. (haha everwhere they want to be is Visa slogan)

Before people start complaining about KYC and AML being a roadblock for people they should look at the amount of business that Western Union does per year all with KYC required each time a transaction happens:

Last year, Western Union completed 231 million consumer-to-consumer transactions worldwide (79% of its business), moving $79 billion of principal between consumers

Western Union charges about 10 percent per transaction.

That means that a person wanting to send money overseas could save a lot of money buying Bitcoin at a Coinstar machine and sending that instead. Are these machines going to capture that entire market? No, but they are going to get some of it, especially as word spreads.

And they are also going to get a huge chunk of the unbanked market that hasn't been easily able to buy Bitcoin up until this point.

I think once Coinstar sees the numbers that they will be working overtime to roll this out very fast. It's going to be an explosion in demand and I believe it's just the beginning.

What matters is the total strength of the network. This adds one more giant new piece to that and opens up options for people and that is important.

Submitted January 21, 2019 at 12:33PM by themop1 http://bit.ly/2FMhJHL