Coinbase VS. Circle – Tried Both with $500 Here’s What I Found

Last updated on January 2nd, 2018 at 12:00 am

IMPORTANT: As of December 7th 2016 Circle no longer allows the option of buying or selling Bitcoins through their services. They are now referring all of their customers to Coinbase.

Probably the biggest competition in the Bitcoin marketplace today lies within Bitcoin exchanges, the most dominant being Coinbase and Circle.
Today I’ve decide to test out these 2 exchanges head to head and see how much value for money I can get using $500. But I didn’t test only the fees and exchange rate, I also tried to figure which website makes the process easier.

Contries supported
Instant buy via Credit card
Transaction fees
Credit card fees
ACH fees
Time for ACH transaction

Coinbase charges fees, Circle Doesn’t – Is that so….

The most noticeable difference between Coinbase and Circle are the transaction fees. Circle states:

“You shouldn’t have to pay fees to use your own money. We don’t charge fees when you convert funds to or from bitcoin with a linked bank account, when you store your bitcoin, or for bitcoin transactions”

Indeed when you buy Bitcoins with Circle you won’t pay a fee but it seems that circle $500 don’t come up as $500 worth of Bitcoins. This is due to several reasons:

There is a credit card processing fee that is applied when buying your Bitcoins with a credit card through Circle. From what I’ve seen this adds up to 2.9% which is not exactly negligible.
It seems that Circle doesn’t guarantee the exchange rate at the time of placing the order (unlike Coinbase). This can cause a difference in how much you pay (initially found this issue on Reddit).

Coinbase on the other hand charges a fixed 1% transaction fee no matter what payment method you use and a $ 0.15 fee for ACH deposits. These fees are pretty low compared to other alternatives out there that allow you to buy Bitcoins.

Circle has the easiest buying process I’ve seen to date

Until today I’ve bought Bitcoins through almost 10 different exchanges. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a website that’s so intuitive as Circle’s. The simple design and sleek animation make it appealing and easy to use for even non tech savvy users.

But the real “magic moment” comes from the ability to purchase Bitcoin with a credit card within 2 minutes of setting up an account. Most websites require some sort of initial verification and until today the process of buying Bitcoins with a credit card was pretty complex. It takes about 2 minutes to complete the process with Circle and I’m willing to pay extra for that.

Coinbase has also done a great job on their website but the process is a bit lengthy and can wear you out. The main issue being the fact that you need to verify your back account and sometimes this can take a day or two.

Coinbase has something fishy going on..

Since 99Bitcoins deals with a lot of people who buy their first Bitcoin I’ve noticed something strange going on lately. On several occasions I’ve gotten emails from people claiming they placed an order on Coinbase and it got canceled claiming that their account is in “high risk”. Oddly enough all of these cancelation happened when the price of Bitcoin went up drastically.

Here’s an example of such a case which caused a delay of purchase for the user. One user was so angry that he went out and made a website called Coinbase Fraud, this websites shows real live examples of Coinbase cancelling orders when it benefits them due to changes in the price of Bitcoin.

I can’t say I’ve experienced such issues with Coinbase myself but it seems to me that I’ve heard about these kinds of stories so many times that there’s probably some truth in it.

Both mobile apps work great, support is also fine

Both Circle’s and Coinbase’s mobile app are pretty intuitive and easy to use. Having said that Circle does a much better job at creating an enjoyable experience (just like their website). At times when I needed support from Coinbase and Circle they both seemed to have responded in a timely manner and got my questions answered.

If you buy $500 worth of Bitcoin here’s what you’ll get

If you spend $500 with Coinbase at today’s exchange rate you’d get 1.3103BTC (all fees included). If you go with Circle you’d receive 1.2782BTC. This may seem that Circle is much more expensive than Coinbase, but it important to note that I’ve measured Coinbase’s ACH payment method with Circle’s credit card method (since I don’t have an American credit card which Coinbase accepts).

This mean that with Coinbase you’ll get the coin 2-4 days after you’ve made the purchase and with Circle you’ll get it instantly – so I guess you should figure out if 0.0321BTC is worth waiting 2 days (

roughly $11 at today’s exchange rate).

Circle is the winner by a nose in my book

After all is said and done, I prefer Circle to Coinbase. Their sleek design, ease of use and lightning fast transaction delivery creates a real “magic moment” for me. I also don’t mind paying more fees for this outstanding experience. If you’re all about saving as much as possible than Coinbase is probably the way to go, but if you want to avoid the hassle choose Circle.

This Big Cryptocurrency Acquisition Could Create a Wall Street-Style Financial Giant

Circle, a cryptocurrency-focused financial-services firm, will announce today that it is buying crypto exchange Poloniex—a move that immediately makes Circle one of the largest and most influential companies in the industry. Fortune’s Robert Hackett profiles a company that hopes to leverage the technology behind Bitcoin to become the bank of the next century.

On a crisp mid-January morning, I arrive at the Boston headquarters of Circle, a cryptocurrency startup, just as the markets tank. As the day unfolds, virtual coins hemorrhage billions of dollars in value. The price of Bitcoin—along with those of the majority of the top 50 cryptocurrencies—plummets more than 20%. It’s one of the market’s worst one-day routs in a winter full of them. Panicked investors dub the drubbing “Red Tuesday.”

But Circle’s office is unusually tranquil. No managers are throwing a hissy fit. No one is shouting “Sell! Sell!”—or “Buy! Buy!” for that matter—from behind a bank of blinking computer monitors. No subordinates are whimpering. And CEO Jeremy Allaire is the calmest of all. “In this market you have to assume regular 20% swings,” Allaire says with a shrug. The boss, who resembles a softer Steve Ballmer, saunters past a klatch of employees chowing down on Aussie-style meat pies. As we walk past a shuffleboard tabletop to chat in a conference room, he seems … pleased?

After all, whether the markets sink or soar, Circle is set to make a killing. The business operates Circle Trade, one of the world’s biggest “over the counter” trading desks for cryptocurrencies. When big price movements push investors to buy and sell, Circle acts as an intermediary between whales and shoppers. Within Circle’s circle, volatility is a moneymaker. “When things start to get really out of whack really fast, that tends to be good for us,” says Dan, Circle’s fast-talking, South Shore of Boston chief trader, who asks Fortune not to print his last name because he “prefers to keep a low profile” for security reasons.

Circle Trade is the primary reason behind Circle’s profitability. The desk handles more than $2 billion a month in cryptocurrency transactions with a minimum deal size of $250,000. (The biggest deals run as high as $200 million.) Customers tend to fall into a few categories: early investors whose coins have soared in value; coin “mining” operations; and cryptocurrency business ventures, including other exchanges, hedge funds, and projects that have hosted “initial coin offerings.” From November through January, Circle Trade brought in more than $60 million in revenue (including several million just on the day of my visit), according to a source familiar with the company’s financials.

With wild fluctuations in cryptocurrency prices, finding clients hasn’t been hard. Dan Morehead, founder and CEO of Pantera Capital, a hedge fund that specializes in cryptocurrencies, says his firm trades on all the major online exchanges, but will turn to a trading outfit, like Circle’s, when the desk posts prices “at a discount to the market.” “That’s when we’re interested in using them,” he says. Other rivals—and trading partners—of Circle’s desk include Cumberland Mining, a subsidiary of the high-speed trading firm DRW in Chicago; Genesis Trading, a New York–based spinout of SecondMarket, the private-company stock exchange; and Octagon Strategy, in Hong Kong.

Garrett See, CEO of DV Chain, a boutique Chicago firm whose biggest cryptocurrency deals reach $5 million, says early adopters are typically the sources of the largest blocks for trading. As he puts it: “Once a quarter, someone wants to buy a jet.”

But the trading desk is only part of Circle’s vision. The company has a bevy of other products, too. There’s its Venmo-like Circle Pay app, which lets users send money with the ease of a text message. There’s its soon-to-launch Circle Invest app, which aims to encourage small, steady investments in cryptocurrencies the way Robinhood does for stocks. And there’s its Centre protocol, an open-source project designed to make disparate digital wallets—like those from Alipay, PayPal, or, yes, Circle—interoperable with one another.

That’s just the start. Now Circle is preparing to take another major leap forward by tacking on an entirely new business as part of its underlying market infrastructure. On Monday Circle will announce, as Fortune can confirm for the first time, that it has bought Poloniex, one of the world’s most active cryptocurrency exchanges. A person familiar with the terms of the deal who was not authorized to speak about it tells Fortune that the price tag comes in around $400 million.

The acquisition will instantly make Circle a rising threat to Coinbase, the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S., as well as Bittrex and Kraken, the runner-ups. Counting contributions from Poloniex, Circle’s revenues over the past three months, excluding February, exceeded $250 million, placing the company on an annual run rate greater than $1 billion. Not bad for a 5-year-old upstart.

With the expansion, Circle is laying the groundwork for a day when cryptocurrencies become pervasive, prices grow less volatile, and the utility of digital tokens goes undisputed. If most of the dozens of exchanges competing today are just places to buy and sell coins, Circle has loftier ambitions: It wants to eventually help consumers turn their trading profits into a Tesla, a mortgage, or a portfolio of blue chips. Circle has ample funds, mainstream investors, sophisticated tech, a new network of customers annexed from Poloniex—and, with some luck, a legitimate chance at building the bank of the next century around crypto-finance.

When Jeremy Allaire cofounded Circle in 2013, dark-web markets and criminal activities dominated the discussion about cryptocurrency—and he cut against the grain by resolving to work closely with regulators.

At an early Bitcoin conference in London, Allaire and his cofounder, Sean Neville, Circle’s president, laid out their vision before a rowdy throng of crypto-anarchists and libertarians. One audience member asked whether they, if presented with a subpoena requesting customer information, would hand over data. Allaire didn’t hesitate in his response—Hell yeah, of course! The confab nearly broke out into a brawl, Neville recalls, with one rabble-rouser rushing the stage, pumping his fist, and shouting to the others, “I will go to jail for you!”

Despite the early tumult, Allaire and Neville found support. The duo’s broader, pragmatic vision attracted big investors—including Goldman Sachs, Chinese Internet giant Baidu, and venture capitalist Jim Breyer, one of the earliest backers of Facebook. In its last round of funding, in June 2016, Circle was valued at $480 million. (It’s no doubt worth a lot more now.)

“We’re very stubborn about the overall vision, but really flexible about how to get there,” Neville says. It’s this seemingly contradictory quality that Raj Date, a Circle investor and erstwhile architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, dubs “paradoxical conservatism”—as demonstrated by Circle’s tightness with regulators. The company was the first startup to be awarded a BitLicense, a certification for virtual currency businesses issued by the New York State Department of Financial Services. It was the first Bitcoin outfit to earn an electronic money license from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. And Allaire, since last year, has advised the International Monetary Fund on fintech policy.

Breyer compares Allaire to Mark Zuckerberg in terms of long-term strategic thinking: Just as the Facebook founder “instinctively understood” the need for an overarching, sticky social platform, not just a network for colleges, Allaire has designs on an entirely new financial operating system—not just another bank. “Our vision was always how to fuse the existing financial system with cryptocurrency as a hybrid, digital model,” Allaire says.

The approach has had hiccups though. After Circle debuted its Bitcoin product in May 2014, fraudsters used stolen credit card numbers to make purchases with the speculative cryptocurrency, thus saddling the startup with high fraud-mitigation costs. Circle eventually pulled the plug on the Bitcoin capability within the Circle Pay app, earning the ire of early proponents. “circle stopping what they did best is a travesty and the ceo should be fired,” one user ranted on Reddit at the time. “they just screwed thousands of people, a LOT who were with them from the very beginning (yours included…), and they just decided to hang themselves from the rafters…. good riddance…”

Even so, Circle outlasted the shutdowns, bankruptcies, and arrests that bedeviled the first round of Bitcoin entrepreneurs—thanks to its deep pockets and discretion. Behind the scenes, the company supported Circle Pay with its trading desk, which provided users with liquidity in all sorts of currencies, virtual or otherwise. Beginning in 2016, that desk focused on becoming a cryptocurrency market maker, and it flourished.

“This thing went hockey stick in the last eight months but, like, it’s been around for four years,” says Dan of Circle Trade. While cryptocurrency prices have been spectacularly mercurial over the past few months, a boon for the business, he says he’s not worried about the market settling down. “As this thing becomes a 10x bigger asset class and has volatility on par with gold, we’ll be dealing with larger tickets and smaller movements. That’s how this thing scales.”

Counterintuitively, Circle has hit its stride just as onlookers might have assumed the company had all but abandoned cryptocurrency. Through its trading desk, Circle created a growth engine—one responsible for spinning up the next phase of its expansion. The desk struck a relationship with Poloniex, its Boston neighbor, after Poloniex became one of the earliest exchanges to list Ether, the native coin of Ethereum, the biggest cryptocurrency network next to Bitcoin. Poloniex, which for now trades only digital tokens (about 70 types), needed a way to translate its cryptocurrency exchange fees into fiat money like U.S. dollars—“to buy cookies and milk and pay rent,” as Allaire likes to say. Often Poloniex did so through Circle’s trading desk. And so began a relationship that would culminate in Monday’s acquisition.

Like many of the big cryptocurrency exchanges, Poloniex has struggled to service an influx of customers over the past year, as has been well documented in complaints on online forums. Users have griped about missing deposits, trouble withdrawing funds, locked accounts, and months-long silences on support issues. In a blog post set to go out Monday, a draft of which Fortune reviewed, Circle promised, “First and immediately…to address Poloniex customer support and scale risk, compliance, and technical operations.”

In interviews, Circle’s executives were reluctant to divulge anything at all about the inner workings of Poloniex, including who runs it, and they declined multiple requests for interviews with the exchange’s principals, saying that Poloniex’s leadership wished to remain out of the spotlight. It’s hard to imagine that kind of caginess flying at a public company, but it works in the privately funded world—and especially the enshrouded Wild West of the cryptocurrency industry, where the risk of crime and legal gray areas lead many players to fiercely guard their anonymity.

In past posts on Poloniex’s Twitter account and website, and on a LinkedIn profile page, a man named Tristan D’Agosta has identified himself as Poloniex’s founder and CEO. The LinkedIn page says D’Agosta is a composer who studied music at Rutgers University. Records show that in 2010 he founded another company, Polonius Sheet Music, based in Highland Park, New Jersey, that sold classical sheet music fastened with spiral bindings. (D’Agosta did not respond to a note from Fortune seeking to confirm the details of his biography.)

“Ever have sheet music misbehave while you’re trying to play from it?” says an early version of Polonius’s “about us” page, available as a cached page on the Internet Archive. The publisher’s website now redirects to real estate listings.

If exchanges like Poloniex have helped build the infrastructure for today’s cryptocurrency mania, their relative secrecy and lack of accountability to customers and regulators have helped fuel the backlash to that mania, especially outside the U.S.

Governments have been struggling to bring down the fever for cryptocurrencies overseas. In the fall, the Chinese government clamped down on the frenzy by banning initial coin offerings, or ICOs, and by tightening controls on cryptocurrency exchanges. South Korea put the kibosh on ICOs, too, and has threatened to levy major taxes on exchanges. Earlier this year, when a popular cryptocurrency tracker, CoinMarketCap.com, delisted Korean exchanges from its pricing calculations, the move triggered a massive selloff and market crash.

Circle, eyeing an opening, aims to get in on the action abroad. In the long term, its Centre protocol aspires to string together the world’s digital wallets, no matter their provenance. In the short term, Circle Pay has been gaining steam in Europe, where rival Venmo has no operations. Circle’s Asia Pacific team plans to grow to 100 employees this year. And Asia remains one of Poloniex’s biggest market opportunities: The exchange’s token-to-token business model already fits with Chinese regulations, which prohibits fiat currency, like the renminbi, in cryptocurrency swaps.

While many Western companies have gotten crushed in their attempts to cross the Pacific, Circle’s executives have navigated the waters successfully so far. The company has taken money from strategic Chinese investors, including Fenbushi Capital, China Everbright Investment Management, China International Capital Corporation, and Baidu Ventures. In 2016, Jim Breyer launched a $1 billion China-focused fund in partnership with IDG Capital Ventures, another Circle investor, and he has toured China with Allaire to meet entrepreneurs and government officials on several occasions. “Much of the innovation today in fintech is occurring outside the U.S.,” says Breyer, who has a long history with Allaire’s earlier ventures, including Macromedia, which acquired the eponymous Allaire Corp. for $360 million in 2001, as well as the video service Brightcove, which held a successful IPO in 2012. Few stateside companies “have their pulse on global blockchain innovation in the way that the leaders of Circle do,” Breyer says.

Unlike the U.S., where cryptocurrency believers are eagerly awaiting Wall Street’s entrée, in China, consumers seem ready to embrace new regimes. They’re already accustomed to digital first payment platforms, like Alipay and WeChat. “In Asia people are daring to imagine an entirely new world,” says Jack Liu, Circle Trade’s Asia chief.

Allaire knows this. In the fall of 2016, during one of our first in-person meetings, he invited me to a WeChat channel where Bitcoin miners across the world—many of whom live in China—jabber all day long. Allaire told me that he believes the strange mishmash of Mandarin and English concocted there is likely to become the lingua franca of the future, a prediction that reminded me of what sci-fi enthusiasts might have said about a Japanese-English hybrid in the ‘80s, when the cyberpunk aesthetic of Neuromancer and Blade Runner held sway.

Many of Circle’s top executives have a worldly bent too. Marieke Flament, Circle’s lead in Europe, speaks English, French, Spanish, and Mandarin. Rachel Mayer, head of Circle Invest and an alum of Lehman Brothers and J.P. Morgan, is Venezuelan. And Circle Trade’s Jack Liu, born in China, has lived in Japan, Canada, and the U.S. (He’s now building out the trading desk in Hong Kong.) Circle’s 175-person team expects to roughly double its headcount this year—and its composition reflects the border-smashing promise of the digital currencies it holds dear.

“Incorporating these assets into your wider portfolio is going to become the standard sooner rather than later,” says Mayer in an interview at the company’s WeWork outpost in Manhattan. Formerly the cofounder and CEO of Trigger, a retail investing app, Mayer envisions millennials will become the main market for Circle Invest, while more sophisticated investors will prefer Circle Poloniex—likely to be renamed Circle X in time to come. In any case, crypto assets are here to stay, she says.

The future is already here, as Neuromancer author William Gibson is said to have so eloquently put it. It’s just not very evenly distributed.

To Allaire and Neville, the cryptocurrency boom represents an inevitable transition: money evolving from cloth to code.

Over the next five to 10 years, they say, all sorts of traditional securities will become “tokenized”—divvied up into virtual stakes recorded on blockchains, the shared ledgers that power cryptocurrencies. People will own and trade small digital slices of everything from real estate, to cars, to houses, to patents, to stocks, to artwork—many of which may programmatically pay out dividends via software-defined “smart” contracts. Advocates say this tokenized future will make new asset classes accessible to smaller investors and lower the costs of transacting and investing, across borders as well as within them.

Why This Well-Funded Startup Just Gave Up on Bitcoin

When it launched in 2013, Circle had serious ambitions to be a major player in the crypto-currency world. The Boston-based startup raised tens of millions from Goldman Sachs and other investors, and advertised its bitcoin business far and wide.

Now, Circle is bailing on bitcoin altogether. The company announced on Wednesday it is focusing on other things, and that its bitcoin customers can cash out or else transfer their accounts to another company, Coinbase, if they wish to keep buying and selling the cryptocurrency.

The move is not entirely surprising as the hype around bitcoin subsided long ago, and the digital currency remains a niche product for speculators or for clandestine online transactions. Meanwhile, the promise of rapid peer-to-peer consumer payments has instead been filled in North America by Venmo, the Paypal-owned startup hugely popular on college campuses.

This has led one-time bitcoin companies to focus on the blockchain, the underlying distributed ledger technology that powers bitcoin. Blockchain is valuable because it allows companies to use the Internet to create tamper-proof transaction records, and promises to reduce the cost of back-end financial services like foreign exchange swamps or settlement clearances.

Circle, like other companies, has been in the process of pivoting towards a blockchain business for some time. In its Wednesday news announcement, the company said its blockchain business is growing within the traditional financial industry.

“Over the past three years, Circle’s treasury operation has evolved into a major liquidity provider and trading counterparty in both the exchange-traded and OTC digital currency markets. We will continue to promote the growth and maturation of such markets as we empower consumers to use digital assets and public blockchains seamlessly as payment rails and not merely as speculative trading instruments,” the company said in a statement.

Circle is positioned to carve out a role in the fast-evolving world of blockchain services, in part because it has spent millions investing in the legal and regulatory infrastructure companies need to operate in cross-border money transfers. But on the other hand, the company also faces stiff competition as banks develop their own blockchain systems and build partnerships with other fintech firms like Ripple to implement blockchain.

On Wednesday, Circle also announced the launch of an open source software project called Spark to promote payment technology related to the blockchain. The move comes after other companies, including Chain and the bank-backed consortium R3, announced similar measures in recent months.

Why banks should jump on board with blockchain.

As for bitcoin, its price is proving surprisingly resilient despite falling out of favor in venture capital circles. The cryptocurrency has sat at over $700 since the Presidential election (it’s currently around $765) and is enjoying an unprecedented period of price stability.

This stability has held up notwithstanding the news the IRS plans to conduct a sweeping probe of Coinbase accounts. The agency has yet to announce a similar probe of Circle.

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I created a yahoo/email account long ago but I lost access to it; can y'all delete all my yahoo/yahoo account except for my newest YaAccount

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In the search for Anaïs Nin, one of the first few links shows a picture of a man. Why? Since Nin is a woman, I can’t figure out why. Can you show some reason for this? Who is he? If you click on the picture a group of pictures of Nin and no mention of that man. Is it an error?

Repair the Yahoo Search App.

Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.

I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and I signed in so he could try to fix the Yahoo Search App not working. He also used another phone, installed the app from the Google Play Store to see if the app would do any kind of search thru the app. The Yahoo Search App just wasn't working.

I also had At&t try to help me because I have UVERSE for my internet service. My internet was working perfectly. Their Technical Support team member checked the Yahoo Search App and it wouldn't work for him either.

We can go to www.yahoo.com and search for any topic or website. It's just the Yahoo Search App that won't allow anyone to do web searches at all.

I let Google know that the Yahoo Search App installed from their Google Play Store had completely stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I told them that Yahoo has made sure that their Yahoo members can't contact them about anything.

I noticed that right after I accepted the agreement that said Oath had joined with Verizon I started having the problem with the Yahoo Search App.
No matter what I search for or website thru the Yahoo Search App it says the following after I searched for
www.att.com.

WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE
This webpage at gttp://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geJGq8BbkrgALEMMITE5jylu=X3oDMTEzcTjdWsyBGNvbG8DYmyxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDTkFQUEMwxzEEc2VjA3NylRo=10/Ru=https%3a%2f%2fwww.att.att.com%2f/Rk=2/Es=plkGNRAB61_XKqFjTEN7J8cXA-
could not be loaded because:
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I tried to search for things like www.homedepot.com. The same thing happened. It would say WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE. The only thing that changed were all the upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
Then it would again say
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED

This is the same thing that happened when Samsung and At&t tried to do any kind of searches thru the Yahoo Search App.

Yahoo needs to fix the problem with their app.

Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.

Why Circle's Bitcoin 'Pivot' Isn't What it Seems

Noelle Acheson is a 10-year veteran of company analysis, corporate finance and fund management, and a member of CoinDesk's product team.

The following article originally appeared in CoinDesk Weekly, a custom-curated newsletter delivered every Sunday, exclusively to our subscribers.

As you've likely heard, Circle announced this week that it had closed down its bitcoin exchange, a move the mainstream press interpreted as a "surprising" pivot away from bitcoin and another nail in the cryptocurrency's coffin.

The reaction is understandable, given Circle's significance in the bitcoin space.

But it is wrong, on many levels:

It is not a surprise.
Nor is it a pivot.
It is not a rejection of bitcoin.
Nor is it bad news for the sector.

Let's go through these points in order, and then take a look at the trend this news highlights.

Retracing steps

The move is not unexpected: Circle has for some time been signalling its intention to focus on payments. When the company's first consumer products were revealed in March 2014, the emphasis was already on "deposits and withdrawals" rather than "buy and sell".

As early as May 2014, the company was downplaying bitcoin, calling itself "an Internet-based consumer finance company".

For the same reason, it's not a pivot. It is true that the company was "born" on bitcoin, but even at the time of its launch in October 2013, CEO and co-founder Jeremy Allaire recognized that standards would evolve and that bitcoin might not end up being the main digital currency.

In other words, even at the beginning, Circle was cryptocurrency agnostic, only at the time bitcoin was the only significant one around.

As far back as November 2014, Allaire told CoinDesk that the focus was less about bitcoin than about how people use money. The latest news is merely the confirmation of a strategy initiated some time ago.

Why not the how

Circle has not "pulled the plug" on bitcoin, as many have reported.

Users can still store it in their Circle account and send it to others. Bitcoin will continue to be a settlement token and Spark, the new protocol unveiled this week, is partly based on the bitcoin system.

What Circle has done is communicate a conviction that bitcoin will not be a significant form of payment in the near future.

While it may be a disappointment for bitcoin fans, this does not deal the sector an unexpected blow. Frustration with the slow evolution is spreading. Nevertheless, the price has been increasing. Innovation on variations of the protocol continues. And progress is being made on scaling solutions, sidechains and much more.

Bitcoin may be stuck. But it is not dead.

Looking at the bigger picture, Circle's decision highlights a quiet but fundamental trend: the focus on applications rather than mechanics.

While bitcoin, ethereum, Corda and many other protocols continue to make noise, the real action is happening elsewhere.

Startups like Circle are putting blockchain efficiencies directly in users' hands. The technology is important, but users are generally more interested in what the protocols can do.

The why has a potentially greater impact than the how, and appealing applications (rather than technicalities) will give blockchains the mainstream acceptance they need to kickstart widespread implementation.

So, the main news in this development isn't that Circle is stopping a service that was never a main feature. It's that functionalities have improved, and more people than ever will have access to what this progress can offer.

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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Bitcoin on Circle

Some information about Bitcoin for Circle Pay customers who still hold it.

Note: We no longer offer the ability to buy and sell Bitcoin on Circle Pay. Customers who hold Bitcoin on Circle Pay can continue to receive and send Bitcoin, but once they convert their balance to another currency, they will not be able to convert it back to Bitcoin. For more information, check out our help article about the changes, found here. If you want to buy and sell Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), you can check out our other app, Circle Invest, which is currently available for most US residents.

Sending Money using the Bitcoin Network

Bitcoin customers on Circle Pay can send money to anyone anywhere in the world no matter what Bitcoin wallet the recipient uses (other cryptocurrencies are not supported on Circle Pay). As the message above mentions, only customers holding Bitcoin on Circle Pay will be able to send money to a BTC address. All transactions are free, secure, and fast no matter where you are sending the funds.

Sign in to your Circle Pay account and navigate to the Send tab. There, you can enter in the amount you’d like to send.
You will have to enter the Bitcoin address to choose where to send your funds. Once the recipient sends you the address for their destination, we suggest copying and pasting the address into the send page to prevent any mistakes.
Alternatively, you can use the Circle Pay app to scan a QR code to send funds, and that will fill in the address information for you! (Other Bitcoin services and online merchants provide QR codes to complete payments.) To scan a QR code, select the QR Code option on the main Account tab, and just point your camera at the code.

How long do bitcoin transactions take to complete?

Bitcoin transactions can take anywhere between a few minutes to about 40 minutes.

That being said, the timeline depends on the network itself. Since the settlement of bitcoin transactions is governed by the speed of confirmations on the blockchain (the public ledger of all Bitcoin transactions), Circle has no way of canceling transactions or speeding them up.

A single confirmation on the blockchain happens within ten minutes. And since Circle requires four such confirmations before clearing a transaction and no longer considering it Pending, the average completion time for these transactions is about 40 minutes.

Note: If 40 minutes has passed, just keep checking back! It will eventually complete 😄 .

Where can you find your Bitcoin address?

As mentioned in the note at the top, only customers who hold Bitcoin on Circle Pay will be able to generate an address. When someone who isn't on Circle wants to send you money, you need to generate a Bitcoin address for destination of payment (Circle Pay customers can just send money to each other via email address). Circle Pay makes it easy to create as many Bitcoin addresses as you would like.

Here's how to generate a BTC address for your Circle Pay account:

On Circle.com

Click on your name in the top right corner of the screen
Click on Get Address in the dropdown menu

Click on the Settings button, second from the right under your account balance on the main Messages tab
Choose My Address from the list
At the top of the screen, select My Address

On Android

Click on the QR Code button, after clicking on the 3 vertical dots in the top right corner of the main screen
At the top of the screen, select My Address

This will generate a new Bitcoin address every time that will stay connected to your Circle Pay account.

You can send that QR code and Bitcoin address to anyone that you choose by copying the address (if you are using a browser) or by selecting the sharing option at the bottom of that page (if you are using a mobile phone).

Other cryptocurrencies

At the moment, Circle does not support any other cryptocurrencies on Circle Pay. For buying and selling Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, you can check out our other product Circle Invest, which is currently available for most US residents.

Circle is Distancing Themselves from Bitcoin

Much has changed at Circle Internet Financial in the past week. The company was granted the first BitLicense from the state of New York, and since made some changes to the service:

Today we took another step toward realizing that goal. Now in the United States, you can send, receive, and hold US dollars in addition to using bitcoin for payments within the Circle app.

You can enjoy the benefits of Bitcoin without ever holding or buying bitcoin yourself, and without being exposed to bitcoin price volatility. Even if you prefer to hold US dollars in your Circle account, you gain security, speed, and open interoperability with bitcoin wallets and services around the globe. You can hold US dollars but still send someone bitcoin, and likewise someone can send you bitcoin and Circle can instantly turn it into US dollars in your account.

And if you still prefer to hold bitcoin instead of dollars? That’s perfectly fine; you can switch back and forth between currencies at any time with zero fees. As we add further currencies, you can expect the same.

Yet, since the announcement, many customers have expressed concern over how the service has operated.

According to some, Circle won’t let them transfer bitcoins out of the service for four weeks. Others have reported Circle has paused deposits and withdrawals. Circle representatives told CCN some changes have been made, but not nearly as all-encompassing as some Redditors make it seem.

“On Tuesday , we updated our send and receive limits, with most customers receiving a limits increase,” Circle VP of Marketing, Josh Hawkins, told me.

For a small number of customers, the limit may have come down or remained the same. These customers can contact Circle support and they will raise the limits, allow customer to move the funds out, and then the limits will be returned to the normal level.

The service interruptions, moreover, were not Circle’s fault.

“We think of ourselves as a consumer finance company. We see bitcoin as an enabling technology,” President and co-founder Sean Neville told Reuters. This position has surprised some Bitcoiners, who were under the impression the company was a Bitcoin company. Not so, and the company makes this clear, even seemingly pushing individuals towards USD accounts.

In a recent advertisement for the company, there is no mention of Bitcoin.

The company, whose backers include Goldman Sachs, was the first to receive a New York BitLicense earlier this week. The company views Bitcoin not as its main product, but, rather, as an enabler to change how people transact.

Circle is Distancing Themselves from Bitcoin

Much has changed at Circle Internet Financial in the past week. The company was granted the first BitLicense from the state of New York, and since made some changes to the service:

Today we took another step toward realizing that goal. Now in the United States, you can send, receive, and hold US dollars in addition to using bitcoin for payments within the Circle app.

Yet, since the announcement, many customers have expressed concern over how the service has operated.

“On Tuesday , we updated our send and receive limits, with most customers receiving a limits increase,” Circle VP of Marketing, Josh Hawkins, told me.

The service interruptions, moreover, were not Circle’s fault.

In a recent advertisement for the company, there is no mention of Bitcoin.

Circle Buys Poloniex | Could it be the Bitcoin Bank of the Future?

Financial services firm Circle have today announced that they are purchasing cryptocurrency trading platform Poloniex.

Though price details were not included in Circle’s official statement, a Fortune report puts the cost at a whopping $400 million. It also raises Circle’s profile as a cryptocurrency exchange, putting it on the heels of leading platforms Coinbase, Bittrex, and Kraken.

Backed by venture capital firms and investors such as Goldman Sachs, Circle is a peer-to-peer payment app which aims to make money transfers as simple and informal as sending a text or e-mail. Using blockchain technology, Circle is ‘on a mission to change the global economy’ by focusing on safe and free money transactions.

In an interview with Reuters, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said that he has ‘been really impressed‘ with Poloniex, nothing that ‘they defined what originally people thought of as ‘altcoin’ exchanges‘. Commenting on the acquisition, Circle said in a statement that:

‘We believe that the contractual rules around exchange for anything and everything will become increasingly represeted in distributed global software, rely on inconvertible distributed shared memory in the form of distributed ledgers, and benefit from the services of global multidimensional marketplaces such as Circle Poloniex. ‘

The value of cryptocurrencies is fluctuating wildly (they were worth $800 Billion USD in January before falling to $450 Billion now) and regulatory bodies are scrutinizing alt-coin ICOs. So it is reasonable to think that such a large investment made by Circle is a bit of a gamble. In addition, a Reuters investigation last September revealed that Poloniex allowed users to trade in up to $2000 of Bitcoin a day by giving very little and sometimes even false information about themselves. However, Circle’s long-term vision sees a wider, safer and more stable market in which digital currencies are more than just something to invest in. They expect an exchange where crypto tokens represent physical goods, credit, rentals, real estate and more. Plus, Circle already has an established history of crypto trading with their Circle Trade platform which apparently trades over $2B a month in Over-the-Counter digital currency exchanges.

So what changes can current Poloniex users expect to see now? Happily, not much. Circle seems to be content with ‘maintaining the features and services that have made Poloniex so familiar and relied upon’ by its users, noting that most of the changes made in the short-term will be behind-the-scenes.

So whether you’re a Poloniex user, crypto enthusiast or potential investor, there may be exciting times ahead.

Bitcoin Price Watch – BTC/USD Falls Below $10,000

Circle to Launch Cryptocurrency Investment App in 2018

Blockchain startup Circle is moving ahead with plans to launch new investment-related products, unveiling a new app set for release next year.

Though the startup hasn't revealed much in the way of details – including its exact launch date –it revealed its plan for "Circle Invest" app in a new post on its website today. In past statements to CoinDesk, Circle indicated that it was looking to create such tools for investors following the acquisition of a startup called Trigger Finance.

"Be one of the first to try our new digital investment product, coming in 2018," Circle wrote, adding that it would feature zero commissions and include functionality for a "variety of coins." A screenshot of the app lists bitcoin, bitcoin cash, ethereum, litecoin and XRP as supported currencies.

The quiet unveiling comes as the price of bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, nears the $10,000 price level.

It also follows a series of product announcements from the firm, including the one for CENTRE, an ethereum-based system to enable transactions between different digital wallets.

Though details on the product remain limited, on the website Circle stated:

"Circle started in 2013, and we've worked in crypto ever since. We're excited to unveil our latest endeavor."

Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Circle.

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суббота, 23 июня 2018 г.

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