Hair-raising encounter with the crypto-fringe
Back in 2014 Kiwi broadband provider Slingshot began accepting Bitcoin, but no longer does. Richlister and Callplus/ Slingshot co-founder Malcolm Dick was an early adopter of the currency but only because he was intrigued by the concept.
He first dabbled in Bitcoin when it cost US$100 and, during a trip to the US almost a decade ago, bought a Bitcoin vending machine. He asked his sister Jacqui Spence, who owns the chain of Mr Barber shops in Auckland, if he could put it in one of her shops.
Dick loaded the machine with three Bitcoin and says he never had to pay for any again. The machine was self-funding, and then some. Back then, just feeding in $20 notes was enough to buy
Bitcoin (now worth US$50,000).
“People kept putting cash in and the Bitcoin was going up so it never actually ran out of Bitcoin.”
At one point Spence was trading haircuts for Bitcoin. But then word about the crypto vending machine in the Queen St barber shop got around and suddenly dodgylooking characters started coming in, and they weren’t after a haircut.
“People were coming in and saying ‘hey I want to put $200,000 into Bitcoin,”’ Dick says. “And we were like ‘Nooo, that’s not what it’s for. It’s like a hobby thing for people with a lazy $20, not for God-knows-what, drug dealers or whatever to convert money’.”
Spence: “I had a guy who said he wanted to bring in five to 10 grand a day and stick it in the Bitcoin machine.”
Yeah, nah, thought Spence. “We didn’t want to get caught up in other people’s scams.”
Dick agreed. They pulled the machine out and it’s sat gathering dust in Spence’s garage ever since. Now, with the Covid-19 lockdowns having cost Spence’s business around $10,000 a month, she thinks wistfully back to that machine and what the Bitcoin enterprise might now be worth if it hadn’t been for the dodgy characters.