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Circle Goes Live. Buy And Sell Bitcoin With Your Credit Card

A step in the right direction and a phenomenal tool for Bitcoin mass adoption. We had a quick look and compared it to previous solutions

Circle Banner
If you haven’t been following their stealthy beta testing for the last couple of months, you may not be aware of the Next Big Thing. Circle

Circle provides a rather sleek looking interface on their website, where you can buy and sell bitcoin. ‘Nothing interesting there’, I suppose you’re thinking. But wait, theres more!… You can link a Credit Card, Debit Card or bank account and and buy and sell bitcoin directly. Thats right, with your card of choice. In seconds.

Now I know you must think I’m giddy and overly joyous for no particular reason. Let me explain. I recently setup an account with an exchange to liquidate some of my wages (bitcoins). It wasn’t a terrible experience, but I did have to photocopy both sides of my drivers licence, and attach a current utility bill, and pay 1% to sell, 1% to transfer, and the spread was average at best. Its only taken a day or so to ‘verify’ that my bank accounts mine, and thats not too bad. But it was tedious and irritating, and it completely negates the ease, provided by the Bitcoin network, to transfer moneys around.

Circle Fees

  • Circle Fees

So Circle lets you transfer directly to a linked card. Maybe its yours, maybe its a friend or partner. You can do it swiftly and efficiently. Theres no fees applied by circle, and theres no spread (the difference between the buy and sell price). What this means is you and I, as Bitcoin aware people, now have a much more convenient on/off ramp (converting to and from bitcoin).

The on/off ramp for bitcoin, or lack thereof,  is a hurdle to mass adoption. Why not use a currency that saves some money or lets you do things you’ve always done with conventional banking? Sure it sounds great; own your own money, take control back from big banks etc etc… Sign me up! The problem so far has been that Bitcoin requires users to have some basic knowledge of how bitcoin works. Ie – how to manage and use a wallet and how to convert back and forth from fiat. Services, like Circle, that remove steps and friction when going from Dollars to Bitcoins and back are vital to get mass adoption going. Every service that removes friction and helps make using Bitcoin idiot-proof is a step in the right direction.

Circle makes bitcoin easy, and useful. I may be slightly biased. As an expat in a foreign country I’ve IMT’d money with banks, scoured the internet for remittance providers that don’t rip you blind on the exchange rate. Had conversations with customer support about the mystery of what the fees actually are for wiring money overseas. I’ve even done the P2P thing with a company called currencyfair. I guess the mundane reality here is that I won’t use cirlce much, but when I do… It’ll be like driving a car instead of riding a horse.

"I’ve been using Circle for over 2 months now and love it. Cheaper and simpler than Coinbase. Once they link bank accounts globally its game over. The adoption rate will excel like we have never seen. The reason Bitcoin lacks massive adoption is that if your not a nerdy computer person you’re not going to understand how to use it. Circle cuts the clutter out and makes it easy to understand for everyone"
— -Reddit User TrueValueCapitol

Give Bitcoin another 2 years and the masses that flood to it won’t even know they’re using Bitcoin. You don’t think about using ‘https’ when you log onto facebook do you? Bitcoin is both a currency and a protocol. The developments in User-Interface & User-Experience (UX/UI) with wallet providers and the increase in quality from On/Off ramps like Circle will see bitcoin as easy to use as waving your Visa card on a pay-wave terminal.


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