The telling part of the Wired.com story about Coinbase releasing a bitcoin debit card is this:
Coinbase, the Silicon Valley startup that operates digital bitcoin wallets for over 2.8 million people across the globe, about 20 percent of the transactions on its network involve payments or other tasks where bitcoin is used as a currency. The other 80 percent of those transactions are mere speculation, where bitcoin is traded as a commodity in search of a profit.
The company rolled out the debit card in an attempt to get more people to spend this digital currency.
If lamentation about lack-of-daily-usage sounds familiar, it’s the same issue that cropped up in my story about Keene’s lonely bitcoin machine. The other bitcoin ATMs in the region have shut down because they don’t get much usage. Why? Because for most people, buying and selling stuff with bitcoin is more of a hassle than buying and selling it with dollars, especially with services like Venmo making payments effortless, and it provides no real advantage unless you like the concept.
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