Coinbase
Discussion
"company founded by Brian Armstrong, who is part of the current class of start-ups being incubated at Y Combinator. Armstrong has three months to get his company off the ground, at which point he will have the opportunity to pitch a roomful of investors on why Coinbase is worth putting even more money into. So far, he has raised $164,000.
“YC’s investment is a signal that legit investors are taking Bitcoin seriously, and I think it has a real chance of disrupting the payments industry,” he said.
The idea behind Coinbase is to make it a lot easier for less technical users to exchange coins.
It’s a bit like PayPal, where you can send and receive money using an email address, which is connected directly to your bank account. Armstrong also plans on making it easy for the functionality to be integrated into a shopping cart, or “buy” buttons on the Internet. He said merchants will be willing to adopt it, because it will reduce transaction fees." (http://allthingsd.com/20120629/betting-on-bitcoin-coinbase-wants-to-be-the-paypal-of-the-internet-only-currency/)
What is the difference between Coinbase and every other Bitcoin wallet service?
From an interview of Brian Armstrong, conducted by Samuel Benson:
There are several good online wallets for Bitcoin, and open source Bitcoin clients for the desktop.
Why should someone use Coinbase instead?
Here are a few ways Coinbase tries to be different:
They try to make Bitcoin easy to use for non-technical users. This means they avoid asking the user to deal with private keys, encryption, or any topics they might be unfamiliar to them. They try to make buying and selling Bitcoin with your local currency as simple as possible. They handle security and backups for you so don’t have to worry about losing your device, or forgetting to back it up. (Note that all of these may not be built yet, but this is their goal for the product.) They understand there are a variety of users in the Bitcoin ecosystem from beginner to advanced, and they certainly do not claim to be the best solution for everyone.
What is the difference between Coinbase and PayPal?
Coinbase uses a different currency underneath (Bitcoin) which is a distributed, open-source protocol for transmitting money. Bitcoin is still relatively new, but they believe it is a good platform to build on top of due to the following properties:
Low (or zero) transaction fees Payments arrive instantly (at about the speed of an email) and are confirmed within the hour Works internationally They try to make Coinbase easy to use and help avoid transaction fees when making payments." (http://bensonsamuel.com/2012/10/24/bitcoin-gets-funded-by-ycombinator-interview-with-the-ceo-of-coinbase/)