The arcade: the last bastion of loose change. Or so we thought.

An old-school arcade, in the retirement capital of New Zealand no less, complete with Pac-Man, pinball and teddy bear claw machines, has started using cryptocurrency.

And actually, it's not that cryptic. Gamers at the Arcadia, in Blenheim, just need the bitcoin app on their smartphones.

RICKY WILSON/STUFF An arcade in Blenheim is accepting the cyber currency bitcoin.

The amount they want is entered into the till, a unique code is scanned with their phone, they hit 'pay' and they're away.

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Customers are then given tokens to slot into the machines.

RICKY WILSON/STUFF Arcadia, in Blenheim, is full of racing games, shoot 'em ups, and pinball machines. It even has an old-school Pac-Man.

Arcadia owner David Scoon said it was as "easy as eftpos".

The only problem is, no-one has actually used it yet. But lots of people were asking about it, Scoon said.

Scoon thought the Arcadia was the first company in Blenheim to use bitcoin.

Stuff How bitcoin works.

He explained the concept as "a wee bit like shares", with the value of a bitcoin fluctuating daily.

Scoon's son Adam Scoon, the mastermind behind bringing bitcoin to the arcade, said he anticipated everyone would be using bitcoin in the future.

"It is getting more and more attention and more people are learning about it and getting into it which pushes its value up even more, we think that eventually everyone will be using it to pay for everything," Adam Scoon said.

University of Canterbury senior lecturer of finance Bill Rea said bitcoin was a "highly secure" form of transferring money.

"It does offer quite a secure way to do transactions," Rea said.

It did however require some technology and IT skills, he said.

More companies and individuals were starting to pick it up as a form of transaction.

"[But] your corner dairy is probably not going to be using it anytime soon," he said.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is internet money, which unlike normal money is not controlled by banks or governments.

The currency works on a cloud database called the blockchain, which houses all transactions ever made.

To use bitcoin you need to download software that lets you access the blockchain and get an online wallet. There are many apps that can help you get one.

Then you can start trading the currency, make purchases or transfer dollars into your wallet through intermediaries that convert your traditional money into cryptocurrency.