This will make it possible for investors who don't dare to (or can't) hold BTC or deal with "shady exchanges" to purchase and invest in bitcoin the most legitime way. If I understand this right, the winklevoss twins are essentially selling their bitcoins to an audience which normally wouldn't buy bitcoin. So all those coins sold to this group, means there are now less coins on the market. As new shares are issued and the winklevoss sells out, they will accumelate new USD which they can use to purchase back their original holdings and additional bitcoins.
It looks like a very bullish sign to me. The biggest concern is that it would probably take months or years to be approved by the regulators (if ever).
BTC doesn't need more speculators. Speculators dump coins in panic the moment the market looks bad. We need a fucking proper bitcoin economy that isn't based off the sale of drugs.
Well, keep dreaming. Bitcoin is more a store of value and a commodity-like, speculative asset.
Bitcoin is unbeatable at something: it cannot be seized, it cannot be intercepted, is pseudo-anonymous.
A service like Silk Road couldn't exist without it. Now tell me,
what kind of other service couldn't exist without Bitcoin? For a lot of day-by-day uses, Paypal (and Credit Cards) do a good job. For Silk Road, they don't. And there you have a real crypto-currency killer app. Without it, that business model is not viable.
Still, the "real economy" surrounding precious metals is minuscule compared to their role as store of value/speculative assets. If Bitcoin succeeds, count on it playing a similar role, being its store of value/speculative use much more relevant that its "real economy" applications.
