Sorry, I got carried away with the other stuff but what I mainly wanted to say was:
That's fantastic news - Congratulations and thank you IBAN, automatic conversion and dual debit card sounds spot on.
Ideally I'd have my pay go directly in but I'll need to consider the following:
- I think it costs my employer more to do a BACS transfer with SEPA than into a UK bank - I'd need to find out how much.
- The automatic conversion sounds great but the GBP orderbook would need to be a lot more lively because unless there is some serious arbing going on I'd hurt badly on the conversion rate!
- I'd be interested to see too how the costs will work out in withdrawing GBP from an ATM when it's automatically converted from Bitcoin.
This could all be simply too prohibitively expensive for some time but the blocks are all in place and frankly I'm likin' it
So I have opened an account, uploaded my ID sent a handful of Bitcoins and intended to 'do my bit' by offering them slightly cheaper than what's currently there
*
But more so than for my own convenience right now I'm really liking this as a step towards integrating bitcoin into normal banking and normal people's lives - makes it look just that little bit less like an outsider only-for-geeks!
I can understand some thinking this is too good to be true and that somehow it will go tits up but it is always the risk for those pioneering the way. The very best to you with it and I hope your persistence on this will reap you ample dividends in time.
* However, I could only get a glimpse of the GBP order book due to lots of Chrome 'Aw, Snap!' messages necessitating reloads. In the end I used bitcoincharts.com Market Depth tab to look at your order book and decide on my ask price. Then found too late I'd somehow flipped back into Euros and ended up making my order in the wrong currency- which of course got snapped up immediately! Doh!! I am now the proud owner of 62 Euros LOL! Tip: maybe something on the order page showing current prices or with the currency more prominent would help? I guess it's a work in progress and there's still a lot of work to be done on site features and stability?
Main message is still CONGRATULATIONS!