I tried to buy $1 of bitcoin from a Las Vegas ATM — and it just proves how far bitcoin is from replacing regular money
I tried to buy $1 of bitcoin from a Las Vegas ATM — and it just proves how far bitcoin is from replacing regular money: I tried to buy $1 of bitcoin from a Las Vegas ATM — and it just proves how far bitcoin is from replacing regular money. Some Las Vegas restaurants accept payment in bitcoin, so I decided to try to buy bitcoin from a casino's bitcoin ATM. I lost all my money. Considering the exorbitant bitcoin ATM fee, I have real doubts as to whether or not bitcoin has a real future as a currency. LAS VEGAS - I've been in Las Vegas for a whole week, but I've only gambled twice: when I played $1 on The Simpsons slot machine in my hotel, and when I tried to buy $1 (and then, another $10) of bitcoin from a casino ATM. Both times, I lost it all. I had heard that the D, a casino and hotel in downtown Las Vegas, had a bitcoin ATM that made it easy to buy and sell the red-hot digital currency. I was intrigued by my colleague's account of a bitcoin ATM in New York City, which he used to buy $5 of bitcoin back in September. So I figured, hey, Las Vegas is about taking chances, and so is bitcoin. I'm no cryptocurrency expert — once, many years ago, someone sent me a super-tiny sliver of bitcoin that vanished when the app he used to send it shut down, and I haven't touched it since. So to get started, I went in intending to invest a single, solitary dollar. To use the ATM, I first had to download a bitcoin-wallet app, which you use to store your digital currency. I settled on Coinbase, from the $1.6 billion startup of the same name. I verified my account, easy-peasy, got my unique QR code to receive funds, and I was ready to go. The ATM experience itself started out smoothly. Before I even started, it told me it was valuing bitcoin at a hair over $15,000 per coin, meaning my $1 would buy the barest, tiny sliver of a single coin. That was fine, I knew what I was in for. The ATM verified my identity with a text message sent to my phone, and everything went smoothly. Then, I put in my dollar bill. It told me it wasn't enough to receive any bitcoin, whatever that meant. So I put in the only other bill I had on me, which was a $10. Still not enough! I guessed there was some kind of minimum that I just wasn't hitting, but the machine wasn't really communicating it to me. So I cancelled the transaction. It warned me that in doing so, I would
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