Normally i'm a silent reader but the price swings lately - especially today - made me register for an account.
Are we really going to "da moon" because of today's news? I have been holding coins for the last two months so i would sure hope for a bit of an upswing.
Clearly PayPal is a huge payment processor and them using bitcoins is another big advertisement for bitcoin.
I'm just not sure if braintree/paypal will just act as a gateway to coinbase or what their plan is.
My understanding is that people will be abled to use their paypal account for payments in another "foreign currency", the XBT/BTC/COIN.
In that case people won't have to learn how bitcoin works. In my opinion, bitcoin will go further into the background.
PayPal will buy new coins each time someone buys a product and quickly after that the merchant will dump these coins again.
People won't need to buy coins on their own and fear a fluctuating exchange rate.
While i see the huge advantage for the non-techies, i don't think it will have a huge impact on the price.
Please share your views on this, i'm interested in your opinions.
Forget the price for a moment. Daily and weekly price movements are noise. Everyone who cries about companies adopting btc because it puts pressure on the price needs to get a brain that thinks more than a week in advance.
The big picture is that the future of bitcoin is adoption and usage by more and more people. Dell, Global Payments, PayPal, etc, are all steps forward in usage. Remittance actually works in the Philippines, at a total cost of 2% (buying, transmitting, selling, dumping cash into bank account), and other countries will follow. None of these will have a huge short term impact on price. But they are necessary and huge successes in the long term, and should be priced in as major stepping stones forward.
The next step is store of value, taking on the tax haven money and gold bugs. These will have a much larger effect on price, but require more stability in price.
If you only care about the price in 6 months, hate on PayPal adoption. If you care about the price in 2 years, cheer for PayPal adoption. More usage, more adoption, demands a higher market cap in the future.
