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Coinsource Targets Midwest Market for Bitcoin ATMs

February 27, 2017         By: Steven Anderson

For a lot of people out there who would like to invest a bit more in bitcoin—or wish they had six years or so ago—one of the biggest questions is where to find them in the first place.

In the Midwest United States, this was particularly difficult, but it’s a point that’s about to get fractionally easier as Coinsource—the largest bitcoin-based ATM network in the United States—makes a tiny expansion into the Midwest. How tiny? Three ATMs worth, and all located in St. Louis, Missouri.

Coinsource brought its first such ATMT operation to the Miracle Mile Shops in Las Vegas, and from there, began an expansion that, two years later, brought the company to 80 total machines in nine different states. The company plans to focus on “capital cities and large population centers,” according to word from Coinsource CEO Sheffield Clark.

In fact, Clark notes that in 2016, the company was averaging 1.2 new machines installed every week, or a little under five a month. That number is only set to rise as the company looks to not only double its per-week installs, but hopes to bring the total installs up to 100 by the end of the first quarter.

Coinsource’s co-founder and current CMO, Bobby Sharp, believes the company could be in as many as 20 states by the end of this year alone.

To someone in South Bend, Des Moines, or even Chicago, this measure might as well put bitcoin ATMs on the moon for all the value it is to them. This isn’t so much an advance into the Midwest as it is a statistical anomaly, the kind of happenstance reserved for questions like “what are the chances a trout will fall on my car tomorrow”?

However, this is also clearly the start of a larger project. The company can only move so fast. It’s also the kind of opening an astute competitor might need; with most of the heartland going underserved, it’s a great staging point for another bitcoin ATM provider to come in and pin down the Midwest—minus St. Louis, of course—on its own.

Bitcoin needs to improve its accessibility and its usefulness to be anything more than an investment flier. Once it pulls these points off, then the sky’s the limit.