No, any centralised company offering to store people's bitcoins for them are doing their users a disservice in not educating them correctly in how to use bitcoin safely and securely. Stop letting other companies look after your bitcoin for you, idiots.
They're in business to offer their services like a bank does, just a different market. Nearly all people that work for a living keep their funds in a bank and their retirement in some sort of broker's hands. Face it, it will only be the techies that store their coins in cold storage off the reservation so to speak. In order to get new people feeling safe in this market and shedding us of the bad PR of the past (gox and stuff), it's a must for the likes of coinbase and circle to have the reputations of credit unions in terms of users storing their money, coins or whatever. Agreed, most people keep their gold and silver on hand but this stuff is way different when the average new person is extremely busy w/ work, family, hobbies and whatever else. Just saying.But as Blockchain.info have just proven, the bad PR will only continue if people keep trusting third parties. You can't (and shouldn't) compare them with banks. The argument that we need to move on from gox by repeating the same mistake with a different company makes no sense. Coinbase, Circle and others could well be ticking timebombs. Regardless of how busy people are, it doesn't take 5 minutes to hammer home the point that if you don't have sole control over the private keys, you don't have control over your bitcoins. Get a desktop or mobile wallet and make a few backups. It's not like it takes a huge amount of time to do that.
