Bitcoin wallet service

Circle

Bitcoin was supposed to address many of them — the costliness of sending money (especially small amounts), the lack of security, cumbersome receipts — but the Bitcoin ecosystem that's developed to this point has itself been largely disappointing and/or self-defeating, with much of it has been focused exclusively on profit seeking.

Circle hopes to be at the vanguard of bringing Bitcoin out of this speculative era and into a more useful one. We wrote about them a couple months ago, when they said they wanted to be the Skype of Bitcoin — a ubiquitous service with a core feature that is totally free, almost like a utility.

Today, at the Bitcoin2014 Conference in Amsterdam, they officially launched their service on an invitation-only basis.

The idea is that you can be your own bank — storing money, sending and receiving payments — all in Bitcoin. But the Bitcoin part will be mostly in the background. Whereas other Bitcoin wallet services, like Coinbase, take several days to process an order to buy Bitcoin — and do some with a defacto commission fee, Circle instantly converts your fiat into Bitcoin, for free.

"Your balances are in dollars, you're sending money in dollars, " CEO Jeremy Allaire told us recently. "That will make more sense for the average person who would say, Why would I want Bitcoin, what can I do with that that I can't already do?"

The service is free, and comes with insurance, although Allaire says users will have a "risk score" attached to their identities that will determine how much of the digital asset users will be able to instantly access. And you'll still have to submit information about your fiat debit account, although that is also the case with Coinbase, the largest Bitcoin wallet service.

That of course creates another huge breach with one of Bitcoin's ostensible initial purposes: complete anonymity. Allaire observes most mainstream customers don't possess the libertarian streak of Bitcoin's earliest adopters.

"It has all these features that will make sense to people and will resonate with people, " he said, "but it’s not about overthrowing world governments or undermining the banking system or things like that. It’s about how do you do something that's faster, cheaper, easier, et cetera."