Coinbase have announced that they have started supporting Ethereum on their system, this is an excerpt from their Coinbase bloq 'We are pleased to announce that Coinbase is adding support for Ethereum. Consumers can now easily buy, sell, send, and store Ether in their Coinbase account. To get started, visit the “Trade” page on Coinbase.com or tap on “Buy” or “Sell” options in our iOS or Android apps".
I was just wondering whether this could be a threat to Bitcoin dominance. Your views
Coinbase has been moving this direction for a while. They already moved into ETH with GDAX. I think the reality is that their business model is failing, and they have burned through millions in funding only to bring in pathetic returns for their investors. They flushed endless money down the toilet on a useless affiliate program that brought in no liquidity.
Their solutions were 1) push Bitcoin Classic, hoping that a hard fork in furtherance of the "cheap/free/instant bitcoin" would be a boon for their payment processing division, and perhaps to adoption. And when that failed, 2) push Ethereum to attain higher overall trading volumes and general interest in their platform.
All said, I think they are going down in flames, and their ringing endorsements of the Ethereum developers look all the more pathetic throughout this DAO/hard fork fiasco. Brian Armstrong makes me sick.
I'll say it once, and I'll say it again. Boycott this company. Fred and Brian have been FUDing bitcoin hard for the better part of a year. Talking incessant shit about Core devs, pushing Bitcoin Classic, spreading nonsense about Classic sybils being representative of the bitcoin community, and pumping Ethereum nonstop for months.
More than that, these guys will blacklist you, or worse, turn you in to law enforcement. So be very careful about what coins you send them, and where you send coins from their platform. That is
if you are bold enough to use their service. Coinbase recently helped the US government arrest the alleged owner of KickassTorrents; he is being extradited from Poland to face criminal copyright infringement charges.
I think this represents one of the main problems of Bitcoin... that Coinbase could even have the option to do something like this.
If we all protest Coinbase, I'm sure another "Coinbase" will pop up again to fill their shoes... Coinbase fills a niche that enables people who don't know much about Bitcoin to buy and store their coins in their wallet, kind of like Xapo and other web wallets. It's just the fact that the government will continue to pressure the exchanges to track peoples every move; just like the government wants to force Apple to allow the government to spy on their users...
It just seems Bitcoin, and any other cryptocurrency for that matter, should be a little more resistant to these types of motivations.