Congratulations! Given how strong the European bitcoin community is, this seems like a very important step. I wonder how they picked the first countries -- were they a set with reciprocal registration, or just with the most reasonable requirements, or bigger markets, ...?
Quote from an interview with Armstrong, their CEO:
For the expansion, Armstrong said that Coinbase reached out to a number of countries in the region, writing letters and engaging local regulators in dialogue about its ability to extend its services to their jurisdictions.
Countries were then given the greenlight based on how favorably they responded to this outreach, and how specific their regulatory requirements were for bitcoin businesses.
Armstrong said:
“We reached out to each country in that region on a case-by-case basis. It was a lot of bank partnerships, a lot of legal and compliance work and some technical integration as well.”
Yay! I've had the Coinbase wallet installed on my phone for months now and not used it because the killer feature for me was "being able to buy Bitcoins". Now I'm glad I live in the Netherlands.
The whole attraction of Coinbase for me is the convenience. I want to use it like Chipknip; for large/important stuff I'll stick to my local wallet and whichever exchange has the best rate.
Mass adoption is important. I see Coinbase as a big driver of that.
I'm disappointed Canada still isn't supported, especially after being the highest voted country in their poll when they asked where would you like to see Coinbase enabled next.
Perhaps they're going for the low hanging fruit first?
Canada already has an established exchange with 10 ATMs located across the country and an established debit mastercard program. Plus there's a second exchange that has been advertising heavily for the past year.
Coinbase's efforts in Canada would probably fall on deaf ears at the moment. Anybody in Canada wishing to purchase Bitcoin has been (somewhat) easily capable of doing so for the past 3 years.
I guess they might still be awaiting some regulation, which is still heavily in flux in the UK. And the UK is definitely outside of the EU on some issues, in particular currency, as they retained the british pound. Onboarding tens of countries by adding 1 currency makes a lot more sense for a startup than adding just 1 country for 1 currency.
It'll definitely happen at some point though, in fact some weeks ago before all of this was announced a dropdown menu with 'US' and 'UK' suddenly appeared in the country selector, sparking speculation of their first foray outside the US.
