
Circle opens doors to global audience - epaga
https://www.circle.com/en/2014/09/29/circle-opens-doors-global-audience
======
mcherm
If I can measure your priorities by viewing your site, it appears that your #1
priority is a certain look-and-feel (as dabeeeenster put it "photos of hot 19
year old girls on a beach"). Along these lines, you have also purchased
"circle.com" \- do you read Dave Eggers too?

Your #2 priority must be investment, since the "Management", "Board", and
"Investors" sections of the site are the only ones that contain any actual
information.[1] You have some impressive backers and impressive funding. In my
experience, companies that are more excited about how much funding they have
raised are less likely to succeed than companies that are excited about the
product they are building.

To sum it up: I am unimpressed.

[1] - Learning that you are "excited about bitcoin" isn't information. Because
of that excitement have you decided to offer bank accounts denominated in
bitcoin? To offer a tool allowing merchants to accept bitcoin for daily
purchases? To create a new offering that will supplant bitcoin? Look -- we're
ALL "excited" about bitcoin: it's an interesting innovation. Being excited
about it isn't news.

~~~
mrb
If you really want to understand how excited Jeremy Allaire (CEO of Circle) is
about Bitcoin, I suggest you read the testimony he gave at the US Senate
hearing on Bitcoin in November 2013. He was 1 of the 7 witnesses invited to
testify:
[http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/download/?id=2369099f-b70d-42e2-...](http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/download/?id=2369099f-b70d-42e2-bee1-ed977a8c8d1c)

I do agree though that the Circle.com website is vague. What they offer as of
today is buying and selling bitcoins. I believe the website is vague because
the company has multiple other products coming down the line (some
speculation: payment processing like BitPay, a Bitcoin-backed credit card,
etc) and Circle does not want to advertise itself as a Bitcoin-exchange-and-
nothing-else company. From what I have heard from Allaire in the past year,
they don't even seem to want to restrict themselves to the Bitcoin currency,
but may work with alternate crypto currencies in the future. So how could they
advertise themselves? "Crypto currency service provider"? The general public
does not know what a crypto currency is. "Digital currency service provider"?
This sounds almost as bad.

~~~
mcherm
Amazon did an excellent job of this. They advertised themselves as an online
bookstore. Then they began selling other items. They had the idea of selling
everything, but they marketed themselves as a bookstore then branched out.

------
dabeeeenster
This homepage is fucking terrible. HOW CAN I USE YOUR PRODUCT? What do I need?
Credit card? Bitcoin address? Fiat bank account? PayPal?

Is it a joke? "We believe in intuitive design and excellent customer support"!
A design so intuitive I have no fucking idea what the hell is going on. Oh but
you have some big depth of field photos of hot 19 year old girls on a beach.
Brilliant.

Just tell me in 1 sentence what you do. And it should be in the damn h1 tag.
As it is it's not on the site at all.

~~~
spoonerVille
from their site it's obvious what circle is: bitcoin for hip young white
people

~~~
dabeeeenster
But it just says at the bottom:

WHY BITCOIN? Bitcoin is a secure, global form of digital money. Brilliant
minds developed and support it. People around the world use it. It provides a
foundation for technologies that make money more powerful every day. The
future of money begins with Bitcoin.

So that tells me precisely nothing.

------
Ixiaus
First: interesting company and concept. I would love to see this go further,
will be keeping my eye on it.

Second: who's idea was it to implement that wretched parallax effect on their
homepage? Not only is it a tawdry but it _gives me vertigo_ which is usually a
rare experience on the modern web and has thus-far created a very negative
experience for me. I stopped looking at the homepage and just read the
wikipedia article on the company instead so my eyes wouldn't hurt.

~~~
corv
Unfortunately the parallax effect is choppy on anything but Chrome for me on
Mac.

~~~
Ixiaus
It's smooth for me (Chrome on Ubuntu) but it's still a maddening design
choice.

------
zsupalla
Less marketing jargon, more actual content. What I find particularly
fascinating is that bitcoin is mentioned a bunch of times passively without
anyone ever saying "this is a bitcoin bank". It's like your supposed to just
intuit the function of the site from a bunch of vague adjectives and adverbs
like "everywhere" and "instant".

------
davidw
I'm afraid people (regular people - not the HN following sort of people) are
going to start getting confused between all the Circles and Squares and
Stripes and so on.

~~~
joeframbach
In the infancy of the following brands, would you be able to derive the
function of the company from its name?:

Barnes and Noble

Ben and Jerry's

Black and Decker

Briggs and Stratton

Look, branding has trends. This is nothing new and has not negatively affected
any of these brands.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
McDonalds. KFC.

~~~
josephwegner
:) Just gotta say it - KFC is a bad example here.

It stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is pretty much exactly their
product.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not any more! They abandoned that name for several reasons - the state of
Kentucky enforced their name as a trademark, plus 'Fried' became a bad word.
So now they're just 'KFC'

~~~
lozf
That's a better description than the Art Director at one Digital Agency who
explained that the reason for the name change to KFC was because _" they
weren't allowed to call it 'chicken' anymore."_

------
johnyzee
This makes bitcoin very accessible. Sign up, buy bitcoins with a credit card
instantly. Exactly what everybody has been asking for.

~~~
onedev
Congrats, you came up with a better tagline on a whim than anyone in their
entire company.

------
gphilip
"Starting today, people _can onboard into_ a Circle account and begin using
digital money..."

That sounds weird to me. I am not a native speaker of English, though. Is this
normal usage?

Googling for "onboard into" gives me headlines that do make sense to me:

"Step onboard into history! - TripAdvisor"

"Bus plunges with two babies onboard into trench — Guyana"

"@KLM Is it possible to take crutches onboard into the cabin"

Do people "onboard into", say, bank accounts?

~~~
josephwegner
"onboarding" has become somewhat of a UX term. It refers to the process of
taking a non-customer and turning them into a customer that understands and
can use the product.

There's actually a website that gives examples of different company's
"onboarding" experiences:
[http://www.useronboard.com/](http://www.useronboard.com/)

~~~
mistermumble
That may well be. For me, it sounded like an HR (human resources dept) term:
"employee on-boarding" (something that sounds like employee water-boarding but
not as bad).

------
firegrind
US bank cards only ? This is "global" in the "World Series" sense of the word,
for the moment.

~~~
corv
I just tried it out with a credit card issued by a European Bank and it works
flawlessly. Very painless process to buy bitcoins instantly.

------
undefined0
> You must be an individual of at least 13 years of age who resides in the
> United States to enter into this Agreement.

So the insurance policy only applies to USA customers, that's why it's not a
huge risk for them as they are targetting a global audience.

They should allow webmasters to redirect too the send page with a URL like
"[https://www.circle.com/send?cost=5&to=1PbiuKqC8L4nsgdkaWwvFH...](https://www.circle.com/send?cost=5&to=1PbiuKqC8L4nsgdkaWwvFHKcm5bxYhCpJf")
so then websites can accept bitcoin easily whilst having a high conversion
rate due to the simplicity Circle provides (in comparison to redirecting them
to Bitpay which would complicate the process for first time bitcoiners).

~~~
notahacker
Viewed from the UK, the user agreement says "You must be an individual of at
least 13 years of age and not reside in the United States to enter into this
Agreement." and also agrees to provide insurance

------
gphilip
The website says that it is both free ("We don't charge fees when you convert
funds to or from bitcoin with a linked bank account, when you store your
bitcoin, or for bitcoin transactions.") AND insured ("All of the money in your
Circle account is insured at no cost to you."). I am not sure how that will
work out for them; given the short and eventful history of BC, I would assume
that insurance charges would be quite steep.

But then: I seem to recall many money changers at airports also advertising
"zero conversion charges", and _they_ seem to be doing just fine even while
paying (what must be) high rents for their spots. So perhaps there is a
revenue model there which I can't suss out.

~~~
gcb0
if they follow you example, they will just convert "without fees" but using
their much more expensive coversion rate

~~~
candu
This. Their revenue model is screwing you over relative to the exchange rate
with massive buy/sell spreads.

~~~
nmj
Wrong. Buy/sell spread is zero, research before you speak.

------
martingordon
If you click on News there are links to download a 2.7 MB archive of Circle
logos in various shapes and sizes and a 36 MB (that's thirty-six megabytes)
headshot of Circle's CEO.

I have no idea what Circle does but I do know it's run by an egomaniac.

~~~
easytiger
They remind me of this bunch of chancers:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn)

------
onedev
I am going to sign up in hopes that these hot girls on beaches will flock to
me.

------
spacefight
Mixed content (http vs https) on your site - how should we as possible clients
trust a financial company who can't manage their content properly?

EDIT: and the eye candies on the front page gives me eye cancer. Seriously.

------
Trezoid
The homepage is almost completely unusable on firefox on OS X. The scrolling
is jerky as hell, things pop in and out seemingly at random and the whole feel
is so broken and terrible that I was so distracted by it that I didn't
actually read any of the content.

It's even worse that on pages completely devoid of moving content and general
broken js, the scrolling is _still_ awful any time you get near the big
picture in the footer.

A big picture, I might add, which has absolutely nothing to do with what I am
guessing from hn comments is the actual point of the site.

------
fmdud
Not a good sign when [https://www.circle.com](https://www.circle.com) shows up
as a blank page.

EDIT: OK, it shows up now. I am still just as unclear on what the product is.

~~~
ajb
[https://www.circle.com/user-agreement](https://www.circle.com/user-agreement)
and [https://www.circle.com/user-agreement](https://www.circle.com/user-
agreement) still appear to be empty though.

EDIT: Okay, I can see them now.

------
alandarev
I know how the banks are gaining revenue on me, and I sleep safe knowing that
they benefit from having me.

Your case - everything is free, are you going to use the bitcoin reserve,
similar to banks? I am not buying the _fluffy ponies_ story, hiding the
revenue is just making you look suspicious.

------
contingencies
My response:

"Now that you left me out of the early stuff, you can go and shove it."

------
gnufied
Looks like it is throwing 503 right now. :/

------
edpichler
This site should not be on the first page of HN.

A lot of people didn't understand exactly what is this product, including
myself.

------
anon0d
How retarded is this, first of all, reading through their privacy terms, I
barfed a bit. The reason people buy fucking bitcoin is to stay anon, with
Circle, practically everybody down to your grandmother in the 3rd knee know
that you just purchased bitcoins.

Secondly, Circle, really? Was Square taken? I would prefer square.

It's like making money on the face of stupid people. Very original.

~~~
twostorytower
"The reason people buy fucking bitcoin is to stay anon"

That's just one reason that somebody might use bitcoin. There's plenty of
others.

