ByPaul Vigna
- Kuno Goda
Welcome to BitBeat, your daily dose of crypto-current events, written by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey.
Bitcoin Latest Price: $354.64/ down 5.99% (via CoinDesk)
Crossing Our Desk:
- In the year since Lamassu released its first bitcoin ATM, the machines are producing an average profit for their owners of $1,000-$3,000 a month, according to new figures the company released on Thursday.
The first Lamassu machine went into operation in August of 2013. the Harvey brothers were showing it off at a series of conventions in the spring and summer (we caught up with them in May and produced this video).
Lamassu said that standard cash-to-bitcoin machines are averaging transactions worth about $20,000 a month. Prime locations are averaging $40,000-$60,000 a month. The firm sells two kinds of machines: a version that processes only cash-to-bitcoin transactions and costs $6,500 to buy, and a version that handles two-way transactions, which costs $12,500. The firm says operators are clearing their investments in the machines in anywhere from three to nine months.
The bitcoin ATM industry is dominated by a few large players, Lamassu, Robocoin, and BitAccess primarily, but as it grows, others are aiming for a piece of the pie. The number of active machines isn’t exactly clear. According to the data site bitcoinpulse, there are 300 bitcoin ATMs in operation. According to CoinDesk, which has an interesting bitcoin ATM map, there are 250 machines in operation; 51 ATMs in the U.S. across 20 states, and 64 in Europe spread across 20 countries. (Paul Vigna)
–This week’s PR debacle at smartphone-based taxi ride service Uber drew a lot of attention, with executives reportedly suggesting the use of an internal Uber tool known as “God View” to dig up dirt on journalists‘ ride activity in what seemed like a potential form of blackmail.
The incident illuminated two misconceptions about Uber that are relevant to creators of cryptocurrency-based community ride-sharing systems. Those are that, unlike those bitcoin-inspired models, Uber and competitors such as Lyft are not 1) ride-sharing services, nor 2) decentralized.
Matan Field, a founder of Tel-Aviv-based blockchain-based ride-sharing service La’Zooz, says Uber is a “real-time smart taxi application but it is definitely not ride-sharing.” Whereas Uber is run by a for-profit company and operated by drivers that are also seeking a profit, La’Zooz is not a company at all, but a “decentralized organization” that’s owned, run and used by the same community in collaborative way.
The system is set up to encourage payments — via special tokens known as zooz — at a “fair fare” rate based on the shared cost of the ride. This definition of ride-sharing will help La’Zooz deal with legal challenges such as those posed by city taxi authorities, Mr. Field said.
And because there is no single, centralized profit-seeking company running LaZooz, it’s designed to make it impossible for any manager of such a centralized company to use some sort of “God’s View” tool to gain access to sensitive rider information. Mr. Field said that while users will input a personal profile that’s used to help riders choose who they want to travel with, that information will be encrypted and only made available between two users at the time of solicitation. No one will have access to a central repository of any information on users, including of their riding activity.
La’Zooz is currently in beta and working through its bugs, but a map on its web site shows that it s slowly growing users around the world by encouraging people to download its app. Those early adopters are busily accumulating preliminary zooz tokens via the “proof of movement” function tied to their phones’ geolocation service, but they can’t yet use them to pay or charge for shared rides.
The organization’s big challenge will be to gain a critical mass of users in one single place so that the ride-sharing function can be turned on and the new community can start to use the service for which it was set up. It’s not sufficient to grow its users around the world; there must be a concentration in one place. Mr. Field said the team has a strategy in place for boosting La’Zooz communities in Israel in the hope that it will later develop similarly large user bases elsewhere.
We will have to see if La’Zooz or its future imitators can work. But one thing’s for certain, it’s not to be confused with Uber. (Michael Casey)
–It’s official: the Bitcoin Foundation is changing its focus to almost exclusively work on promoting the development of bitcoin’s core protocol software.
New Executive Director Patrick Murck hinted as much when we spoke to him last month but the details of it were laid it in a blog post Wednesday by Foundation communications director, Jinyoung Englund.
Based on the results of a survey of members, the Foundation has decided to a series of practical first steps, Ms. Englund said, including “shedding anything that does not support core development, preparing to bring on at least one additional full-time developer for testing within the next several months, and launching at least 4 developer training and certification workshops around the world starting 2015.” (Michael Casey)
In the News:
- Mozilla, the open-source software group, was in the news this week when it struck an agreement with Yahoo, making the latter’s search engine the default option for Mozilla’s Firefox browser.Presumably, Yahoo outbid Google for the contract (which cost Google roughly $300 million a year). But Mozilla isn’t done raising money. The foundation announced that it will start accepting bitcoin donations, via Coinbase. (Paul Vigna)
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