In a sideshow within a marketing sideshow here at CES—the “Bitcoin pavilion” at an event called the Startup Debut—a small collection of Bitcoin-related startups showed off various attempts to capitalize (and monetize) on the interest in the crypto-currency.

One of those companies is Lamassu, the creators of a device that works the opposite way—it lets people turn hard currency into bitcoins, sent directly to their chosen address. The Bitcoin Machine, the creation of brothers and co-founders Josh and Zach Harvey, is an automated bitcoin “reverse-ATM." Simply scan the QR code for your Bitcoin digital wallet, insert bills into the machine, and it will transfer the matching value (at current market rates) of bitcoins to you (minus a small transaction commission).

The machine runs an embedded Linux OS on an ARM processor, but the actual transactions take place on Lamassu’s servers. So far, over 130 have been sold worldwide, and 43 have been deployed everywhere from Canada to Kyrgyzstan.

The Bitcoin Machine can theoretically handle any paper currency with its USB currency scanner (dependent on the firmware installed in the scanner), and it can pay out “microbitcoins” for transactions as small as a dollar. But its purpose is really more transactional, allowing people to convert cash to bitcoins when they need to use the cryptocurrency for a transaction.

One place those transactions might happen is the BitcoinShop.US, an online mall that takes payments exclusively in (you guessed it) bitcoins. Michal Handerhan, the co-founder and CEO, says his company acts as a reseller for manufacturers, handling purchases from customers around the US and overseas (one customer placed orders for delivery to a US Air Force post in the Pacific). While the number of orders BitcoinShop has handled is only in the hundreds, those transactions are usually large and include multiple items of high value. Customers have purchased everything from ukuleles to a 578-pound gun safe.

The third entity we encountered on a tour of the Bitcoin penny arcade was KryptoKit, the Canadian company behind a Chrome app that acts as a Bitcoin wallet and social networking platform. KryptoKit, which now has Bitcoin Magazine co-founder Vitalik Buterin aboard as an employee, is designed to make it easy for users to make cryptocurrency payments on the Web. It captures Bitcoin addresses within webpages and exposes them within the tool as places to send payments. It also offers a GPG-based encrypted instant messaging platform alongside the wallet—a feature that may be even more popular than paying with bitcoins. It should also help Bitcoin aficionados keep on top of the latest market moves, news, and Reddit posts.