Most coinbase merchants only use bitcoin for the transaction, and immediately convert to dollars. This results in much lower transaction fees, and they aren't exposed the the variability. This IMO is a story that is buried under the speculation hype. Coinbase is targeting PayPal and Visa. For merchants that feel a lot of transaction pain, bitcoin looks very attractive. EDIT: You'll notice in the video Armstrong only refers to price in terms of the attention it brings. They are actually focused on bitcoin as a network for transactions. That's the upside that they are building a service around. There are actually a number of things that the bitcoin protocol can do, but aren't currently implemented, like doing m of n party transactions, whereby a transaction doesn't occur unless m of n parties agree. The means that escrows, trusts, etc can be a function of the network itself. I'm pretty sure that's what he is alluding to with the wills.