Ok, I'll humour you.
What happens when a Circle customer wants to buy something over the web from a merchant who isn't a Circle user? Maybe they use BitPay, or another service, or they're happy accepting funds in bitcoins. Do they:
1) Send a cheque, and inform the merchant by email (followed by a phone call)
2) Make a SWIFT transfer
3) Bridge the gap in some other way?
You tell me. We are talking about a customer who starts with dollars in hand and a merchant who wants dollars, correct? (Otherwise it is the old fiat-to-bitcoin service that they allready had.)
Don't you also think a start-up company (the clue's in the phrase) might anticipate a growth in their chosen sector?
Like BitPay and Coinbase, when they started they certainly expected the fiat-to-bitcoin and bitcoin-to-fiat market to grow "exponentially".
Jorge, when a customer starts with dollars in hand (or BTCs) he doesn't care about the internal transfer system. Paypal, for instance could use an electronic transaction system based on email (!) to pay from one customer to another. BTC has a use here because of the low transaction fees and the instant physis of the medium. Again, this is an internal process and nothing more. Each company judges for its best interest what's best for them. How's that affecting bitcoin remains as an exercise to the reader...
BitPay & Coinbase (as with other companies as well) invested in what they thought BTC will be in an horizon more than 5 years IMHO. You don't invest money into a business if you're expecting fast-cash-right-here-right-now. Those people have business plans that may be fruitful after the 2nd even the 3rd year of investment. Remember the first steps of Facebook? Remember Apple in the 2000's ?
That's how the story goes.
