Circle may be a game changer. You can sign-up on your phone from anywhere and purchase your first bitcoins with your credit card within minutes. The fact that they use mandatory 2FA (via SMS by default) also makes me feel better about recommending this service to acquaintances. Should COIN launch this winter, then the fiat <---> bitcoin gateway infrastructure will be ripe to support another wave of adoption.
I still maintain the impact of COIN is being grossly underestimated. The vast majority of "investment dollars" do not sit on bank accounts linked to coinbase or credit card limits linked to circle.
Instead most funds sit in brokerage accounts. During the run where I made most of my purchases, my biggest obstacle was wiring funds from my Brokerage account to my Bank account, so then I could issue a coinbase purchase. Since I see bitcoin as a core asset to hold, this was completely backwards.
COIN will link brokerage accounts to bitcoin, there is a huge amount of funds there....
there is also a huge difference in that you do not actually own bitcoins but COIN shares.
sure some institutional investors might not care. but you are then only "invested" in the Bitcoin economy and not necessarily own an actual share it in. which is perfectly fine, but still....
(I have to say I might be wrong. Could you claim your share in COIN for its equivalent in BTC? I do not think so but maybe someone can confirm.)
I think the shares will be used to purchase BTC so it will roughly track the price of bitcoin. This is at the owners descretion.... so you may see cases where it does not track it. Simply put if its not making money people will not buy shares... but dividends should be offered to entice people to buy shares rather than bitcoin... thats how I kind of guess it works anyway on top of my head knowing how equities work. Because its backed by a regulated exchange, many people will simply hold the shares collecting dividends rather than bitcoin because you would get value on the way up (roughly) and collect interest. For me, personally I prefer to hold bitAssets once the pegs are known to work in bitshares as this will collect me more interest and I own it in a decentralized system rather than depend on a stock exchange susceptible to the pitfals of our modern economy... can happen overnight... its a tradeoff either way.
Some COIN supporters are of the belief that it will SET the price of bitcoin, in much the way that gold ETFs set the price of gold.
The significant differences between gold and bitcoin may run squarely counter to this belief. Gold ETFs are useful because storage and transport of that commodity bear costs and risks higher than the ETF ownership, where the opposite is true of COIN. I suspect that often it will influence and follow rather than lead.
There is a long thread on this:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2681929I offered the OP and my chief interlocutor on that thread to do a debate on stage at one of the many Bitcoin conferences but couldn't persuade him to do so.
There will also be some opportunity for truly massive fiat manipulation of COIN due to its projected high liquidity. In such cases it can be expected to lead price up or down as arbitraging will shift value in and out to the extent that it is trusted.
I suspect that the real time p2p bitcoin exchanges OTC, and localbitcoin and the others will have the highest prices in most cases. As is said of gold, if you don't hold it, you don't own it.
