I bought some Bitcoin at a Coinstar kiosk

For those who don't know, Coinstar kiosks are those machines available in a lot of grocery stores in the US (e.g. Safeway), and recently, they added support to exchange cash for Bitcoin: https://www.coinstar.com/bitcoin

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I wanted to try it to see what it entails, here's what you need to do:

1. Insert bills in the machine
2. Enter your phone number
3. You get a voucher to redeem your coins
4. Go to coinme.com/redeem to redeem your voucher
5. Fill in your email, phone, fullname and code
6. You then need to verify your identity (powered by onfido). You can either use your passport, driver license, or ID.
7. You are asked to take a selfie
8. Verification happens under 5mins (Machile learning?) and you are asked to create a wallet on https://www.coinmewallet.com/
9. Once you've created your wallet, it asks for the PIN and the bitcoins are transferred to your wallet.
10. From there, you can receive and send your Bitcoins.

The cost was:

• Exchange rate: $3572.65 (~$200 over Coinbase price, but a small dump had just happened, so could be only ~$100 over and be late)
• Fees: 4%

I'm not judging, the more ways to onboard FIAT into Bitcoin, the better, I guess it's competitive with regular ATMs, but the KYC is kind of annoying the first time you use it.

submitted by /u/amorpisseur
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