Having signed up, it appears to be promising a debit card to get people to sign up to what is essentially an affiliate-scheme feeding website.<p>1) I signed up with only Email, First, Last and a 4-digit PIN for a password. An email address and a 4 digit password on something storing my money? Scary.<p>2) The site wanted to spam my gmail contacts to "earn more bitcoins".<p>3) There are loads of survey offers to earn more bitcoin.<p>4) Preording the card felt like a worthless act with no substance behind it. I did so without providing any extra details, they didn't even ask for my country of residence.<p>I suspect they'll eventually turn round and say "oops, looks like we can't do the debit card".
These are all scams. No amount of VC money can solve this problem because it's not a technology problem it's a legal and political problem centered around the legal definition of 'money laundering'. See e-gold, liberty reserve, etc
This is what a real bitcoin debit card looks like, courtesy of CoinKite:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2nRDFoeQHo" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2nRDFoeQHo</a>
The debit card shouldn't require any trust. The card itself should be able to sign a transaction, transmit it to the card scanner, and have the scanner propagate it to the network. Obviously, involving a third party exchange is the only way (right now) to spend BitCoin in places that only accept fiat, but at the very least on BTC -> BTC transactions should be direct and not through third parties.
Not the 'world's first', been plenty of bitcoin to debit card schemes. I have an ecoin.cc card Russians reload automatically whenever I send BTC/LTC