Not sure, what do you mean?  That Bitcoin speculators are above crime & money laundering *cough* MagicalTux Sherm BTCKing Ukyo TradeFortress?

did pantera just launch the paypal killer

 

https://aligncommerce.com/

Every example you gave involves speculation. In other words, the criminals and scammers are a subset of the speculators, and the speculators (criminal and otherwise) are almost the entire thing. At one time the original Silk Road was criminal but not speculation (and indeed the closest Bitcoin has come to mainstream adoption) and that would support your premise, but dark markets are only a shadow of that at the point. Now we are back to criminal and non-criminal speculation.

Where this is likely going is Coinbase declaring coins from pools that don't play ball to be "high risk" or alternately declaring all coins of unknown origin to be "high risk". High risk means they won't process transactions involving those coins (will require you to send them back or possibly just seize them) or will close your account if you try to do so.

I can see a situation fairly soon (if not now) where services like Coinbase, etc. will only deal in coins that are something of a closed loop between themselves, Bitpay, and a few others, meaning those services will be available only to customers for whom that is their entire use case for Bitcoin. The rest who trade coins outside "the system" will find themselves in a new version of unbanked.

This is not satoshi's Bitcoin any more.

Whoah, I get it. I get what's going on here. They're backdooring Bitcoin into the mainstream.

Connect the dots:

1) No mention of Bitcoin on Align's website, except in the press section headlines, even though they use it. Only ever mention "the blockchain" and "blockchain technology."

2) Somehow this has escaped mention onr/Bitcoin and elsewhere, even though it's gigantic news. They've deliberately not associated with "Bitcoin" overtly. It seems at first strange, because they could have had a bunch of easy customers from the Bitcoin community, as well as its support. Think: Overstock's Bitcoin acceptance launch where they got a bit of a sales boost. But it makes perfect sense when you realize they're gunning higher. The old paradigm is to offer service for the Bitcoin community; the new paradigm is to offer services that use Bitcoin and include no reference to it, because customers don't need to understand it, know how to secure it, or deal with it at all.

2) The recent trend of, "We don't know about this Bitcoin thing, but blockchain technology is the future" is turned on its head by Align's strategy. What was a sort of backhanded dismissal becomes a Trojan horse. Bitcoin quietly becomes the payment rails for better bank wires, stigma intact but irrelevant because no one knows they're using Bitcoin.

3) The general sense among some thinkers in the space that "when Bitcoin succeeds it'll be because people don't even know they're using it."

The implications for investment are obvious, but users of Align's service are completely removed from that. Investing in Bitcoin, to them, would be like investing in Cisco because they like buying books on Amazon.com. But Cisco still did very well because it was needed for the backbone infrastructure and investors recognized that.

sounds like the Coin.ph model except for businesses only.

Grinding higher.

 This one could hurt.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2015/04/02/how-bitcoin-will-end-world-poverty/

Posted by Steve Forbes himself.

Once again I agree with you on most points.

This and Abra Global are two beautiful ways of abstracting Bitcoin out of the picture for the benefit of commercial and mass consumer adoption.

They seem to have a great team and equally impressive backers.