Things are so unpredictable. That's regarding the whole Bitcoin (r)evolution. I believe what's currently happening and has happened is great. All these random events that pushed its price down are giving enough time for any interested entities to acquire them at reasonable price - if they understand it and think it may be a good value storage. And it may turn out to be a really good value storage indeed.
Regarding Coinbase I would assume they are convincing their investors that the company has a huge value and expertise even assuming total Bitcoin collapse / switch to another digital currency.
There are 8 names on the press release, and probably a few more smaller investors. This doesn't represent a huge amount of money for any given fund - at most probably US$20m or so for the lead. The payoff should BTC prove useful will be in the realms of Facebook/Google/Apple valuations. Even if you think there's only a fraction of a percent probabilty that they'll be successful it'd still be worthwhile putting a few million in (assuming you can afford to lose it).
Personally, I think BTC is going to be OK because there's already a decent ecosystem growing around it. Enough people are keen on it succeeding that it'll do something useful. The real question is whether it'll be a multi-trillion dollar industry that replaces money or a multi-billion dollar industry that's used for secure value transactions or proof of work or something, not than whether or not it'll fail entirely and disappear.
> Enough people are keen on it succeeding that it'll do something useful.
Exactly. I am personally convinced it will succeed, but I don't know in which way. It could be anything that benefits of proof of work.
Are there actually libraries, or clients which create a P2P network, that is generic? I mean the client synchronization is the same as in BTC, but the data exchanged is generic.
Regarding Coinbase I would assume they are convincing their investors that the company has a huge value and expertise even assuming total Bitcoin collapse / switch to another digital currency.