There's A Gold-Dispensing ATM on West 57th Street

I have seen more than one of these &quot;vending machines&quot; in Dubai.<p>Interesting thing is that they constantly adjust the price of the gold bars as the price of gold fluctuates. I guess these machines need a permanent internet connection to receive the current gold price.<p>Who will be the first to do a MITM and adjust the price to 0.001? ;)

Those silver American Eagles make a great, almost magical from the child&#x27;s perspective, alternative to the lame-o paper dollar under the pillow when your kid looses a tooth, but I would recommend working your way up to them as it gets a little expensive, especially if you have more than one toddler.

If you have some time, and are interested in culture, architecture, history or just New York from an interesting perspective, it&#x27;s worth reading some more of Scouting NY. There&#x27;s a whole lot of very interesting material there, and some nice photographs too.

Saw this a little while back, the novelty is fun, but the prices are really, really high.<p>Silver spot right now is ~$19&#x2F;oz and they&#x27;re selling it for $88, a 360%+ markup (granted this is a coin vs a bar).<p>Gold spot is ~$1260&#x2F;oz, and their 1oz is $1367, 8.5% markup, their 10g is $1389&#x2F;oz, a 10% markup.<p>If you were interested in gold, you could get from APMEX for $1,336.83&#x2F;oz credit, or less for cash. Or from a nice man in the diamond district for spot plus $50 cash.

We now have a bitcoin ATM at MIT.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/oR6yjEt.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;oR6yjEt.jpg</a>

Conceptually, is this an ATM or a vending machine?

I don&#x27;t understand these. What are people using it for? Is it just for novelty purposes, and as a promotional tool for gold as an investment?

There is also a cupcake ATM: <a href="http://www.sprinkles.com/cupcake-atm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sprinkles.com&#x2F;cupcake-atm</a>

I like the idea, but feel like I&#x27;d get robbed on the way home.

Problem is as soon as you buy it you lose money. The reason being that if you want to sell it back you must go to a dealer he will low ball you and you will have a hard time getting the actual value of the gold. It is not like $100 bill that you could just spend on whatever you want, you are stuck with something that in order to cash out you must take a cut by selling it to a dealer.

In Bergamo&#x27;s low-cost-airlines airport (Milan) there has been one of this for many years. I have never seen anyone using it though.

Someone in the comments: &quot;what if someone files a chargeback on the card?&quot;. Any thoughts on this? By using the machine you&#x27;ve moved from a reversible transaction to an ireversible transaction. It looks ripe for scammers to abuse.<p>At least at a counter they&#x27;d have your face on cam, but with this they don&#x27;t.

There&#x27;s been one at the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi for a while now...I have seen people using it.

ATM is a bit of a misnomer isn&#x27;t it? Can you deposit gold into your &quot;account&quot; at the machine? If not then it&#x27;s similar to any other sales kiosk (like the ones at the airport selling headphones)

This has been done before in several places before from Dubai to China <a href="http://whenonearth.net/withdraw-gold-atm-dubai/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;whenonearth.net&#x2F;withdraw-gold-atm-dubai&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve seen these machines in casinos where the vig is ridiculous, like 15-20%. This one seems reasonable at 5%.

IIRC there is also one in the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas.

That guy sure has an awesome job!