Why is this being billed as the "first U.S. Bitcoin exchange"? No doubt Coinbase will do a good job but it isn't the first or even the first regulated exchange based in the US. CampBX, Kraken, and Coinsetter are all based in the US and follow regulations.
If there actually is some distinction between what Coinbase is doing here and what the existing exchanges have been doing for some time I'd be interested to know what that is.
You're right in that it's not the "first US Bitcoin exchange". However, it is the first US bitcoin exchange with some amount of money transmitter licenses (none of the companies you listed have them to my knowledge). If you're not familiar with money transmitter licenses, it's what you need from most state regulators to move or hold money for customers in that state. That's why we can't support all states at launch. You can see a list of the states we support here: https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/178054...
There hasn't been a US based exchange which has had meaningful volume in comparison to the larger international exchanges, so our hope is this gives people a US option that is both stable (both on regulation and security) and has reasonable liquidity.
>However, it is the first US bitcoin exchange with some amount of money transmitter licenses
Not true. There are definitely exchanges out there that have state MSB licenses. Perhaps you're unaware of their existence. I know companies can sometimes be secretive about this stuff, but exchanges like CoinX have MSB state licenses. Check out http://coinx.com/money-transmitter-licenses for instance.
VP CoinX here: We do have an exchange, www.coinxtrader.com (it is mentioned on our main website, coinx.com). We were the very first exchange to obtain MTLs, that is the route we took when we established our company.
With respect to the second point, "real-product" We have a working exchange in addition to money-transfer services in the shape of coinhub.com (which goes live in a few weeks time).
"Password must be at least 8 characters and must include at least one upper case letter, one lower case letter, and one numeric digit"
even though my password meets the requirements.
Also, something seems off. There has to be a reason that you guys aren't used that isn't being acknowledged. I have never heard of anyone using your platform, ever, and when I search for images of the trading interface all I can find are stock photos of lame graphics. Seriously, what's up? There has to be a reason, right?
If there actually is some distinction between what Coinbase is doing here and what the existing exchanges have been doing for some time I'd be interested to know what that is.