Buy Gold with Bitcoin – Seriously?

Yes, Seriously. WordPress and Paymium aside, Coinabul is a Bitcoin company that provides more validation to the success and stability of Bitcoin. Coinabul is the first Bitcoin to Gold resource available to the Bitcoin marketplace.

I caught up with the Chief of Coinabul Jay Shore and got a few thoughts from him about Coinabul, Bitcoin & regulations.

1. Tell me a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What was the tipping point for you to get involved in Bitcoin? How big is your team?

I’ve got a background in computer science dating back more than a decade, with an emphasis on web application development. We’re based in the USA, and the key figures in our team have been involved in Bitcoin for years- I personally have always found the technology appealing from a development and day-trading viewpoint ever since I heard about it around the later part of 2010.

2. Do you think that Bitcoin is ready for the mass adoption and use? If No, Why not? If Yes, How can it spread faster?

Bitcoin is certainly ready for widespread adoption. Whether it’s viable for someone who is not technically inclined to become a Bitcoin user is relatively undetermined- as young as Bitcoin is there are a lot of services which make it easy for new users who are not technically savvy to use the platform, and large corporate supporters such as WordPress who advocate for and provide tools for widespread adoption. The main thing that will bring Bitcoin into a more widely consumed state will be market stability, I feel- this will let new users feel more confident, veterans less skittish, and new businesses join in without hesitation.

3. Any big news to be announced to the world? Something new from Coinabul which is right around the corner?

There is nothing particularly new happening for Coinabul customers with the exception of even faster processing times, as well as cheaper shipping for all of our international clients. We have recently renegotiated rates with our shipping carriers such that we are able to bring our rates for clients down a fair bit.

4. What is your roadmap for 2013-2014?

Mainly, our goal for 2013 is to increase efficiency as we scale, and continue to grow as substantially as we have in 2012. This entails a huge amount of work in various ways, which I won’t get into here as it’s really quite mundane and tedious. However, I will outline some of our primary goals: grow the amount and variety of stock we have on hand at any given point, increase the number of employees and premises we have, decrease processing times, and increase the frequency as well as size of orders which we process.

5. Any Partnerships that you envision to enable faster growth of Coinabul?

We are exploring critical growth partnerships with various entities to help us continue to improve our product offering, although I cannot really get into that in a public medium.

6. What are the legality aspects of Coinabul? Does Metal to BTC/ BTC to Metal rest in the grey area of law or is it unregulated?

BTC/precious metals exchange is a very complicated endeavor both from a legal and a logistics perspective. We encounter huge amounts of legal constraint as a fringe service operator in a regulated market, but we have amazing legal minds who keep us compliant within, and voluntarily above and beyond, the bounds of regulations that we are obligated to follow.

7. What kind of effort goes into running a growing business like Coinabul? Any challenges that are pressed at you every day?

The primary hurdles we overcome tend to be fairly standard in terms of a company experiencing massive and rapid growth. As a fixture in the Bitcoin community for more than a year, we have established a huge amount of trust which generates larger and larger daily volumes for us. While we grow, we have to do all of the fun things that are required for expanding businesses but on a much more accelerated curve.

8. What advice can you share for budding entrepreneurs?

As far as advice I can give to budding entrepreneurs, I can only recommend a few things:

Do what you love;

Stay dedicated to your projects, but if it’s not taking off you have to cut your losses and move forward or reformulate your model;

Don’t quit your day job until your startup requires you to do so;

Build the right team early on since you can’t do every task by yourself as you scale;

Don’t be afraid of change- it is innovation as well as hard work that powers your startup.

9. Any thoughts on Bitcoin in India?

India is a growing Bitcoin market, and I see more and more services and users coming out of India day to day.

In a world of Bitcoin entrepreneurs, Coinabul seems to have taken some of the biggest risks in the market and listening to Jay talk about their viral growth, there is no doubt that they are an entity to watch as Bitcoin covers the globe.

Maintaining 24/7 updated prices, a provision for voice based customer service, dipping shipping costs and a well accredited team makes these guys one of the earliest Bitcoin success stories.

Links:

Coinabul Website