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I have seen more than one of these "vending machines" in Dubai. Interesting thing is that they constantly adjust the price of the gold bars as the price of gol
by LeonM 12y ago
I have seen more than one of these "vending machines" in Dubai.
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.
Who will be the first to do a MITM and adjust the price to 0.001? ;)
- Killah911 12y agoYou'd have to have quite a bit of inside info to do that & given hopefully the designers of the machine had enough forethought to not connect the thing to the open internet. To top that off they may even have programmed it to stop if the price variations get too crazy (99% drop may trigger it).
- mathattack 12y agoI expect that the commission they charge is fairly hefty too. They'd also need solid physical security.
- phpnode 12y agoThese machines likely contain very small inventories, the value of their contents is almost certainly exceeded by a typical ATM.
- mathattack 12y agoI would think it's less traceable though, no? This is not coming from any industry knowledge, but I would think that an ATM would know the bill #s, so if you stole it, the bills would be tagged. You can always melt the gold. But this isn't based on any practical knowledge.
- pessimizer 12y agoYou're making the mistake of assuming that the people who built it are as competent as you are when you're relaxed and posting on HN, rather than being the lowest bidder and/or somebody's cousin and/or having a two-week deadline. It's probably implemented in javascript + nodejs w/mongodb.
- rquantz 12y agoIt's probably implemented in COBOL.
- pessimizer 12y agoOne would hope.
- bane 12y agoOut of curiosity, other than owning a lump of gold, what exactly are you supposed to do with it once you have it?
- andrewSC 12y agoTalk about how you own a lump of gold, of course.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- drdaeman 12y agoStore as an asset?
- pavel_lishin 12y agoWell, if you paid a tenth of a penny per whatever-the-unit-is, you presumably sell it for its actual current value.
- bcbrown 12y agoYou look at it.
- cdcarter 12y agoProbably need a permanent connection of some sort to run a credit card, too.