That's not a debit card. It's a prepaid card. Presumably it's been preloaded with some amount of money. Maybe they'll refill it from your Coinbase account if you use it. Maybe not. Here's the
FAQ from the card issuer. There's a site where you can register the card, then read your balance. It may be that the people behind the Bitcoin scheme have already done that, and they're monitoring balances and refilling. Or not.
Right -it's part of their Beta program, so that's not unexpected. I understand that it is a prepaid Visa, but it functions as a debit card. I'm able to use it to draw funds from an account with a third-party provider (Coinbase), so the details of how that's done in the legacy financial system isn't my concern.
Incidentally, after one year, you'll be charged 1000 yen for that card.
If they're still in Beta a year from now, that might be a problem. Their problem, by the way - not mine.
They may not even know when that card is used.
They do, see screenshot above. They sent me a text message within 30 seconds of each transaction today.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, I might be out the 110 millibits I have in my Coinbase account. If you think I'll ever have significant money sitting in my Coinbase account, you're nuts.
I'm also explicitly not recommending anyone go out and try to get one of these. There are real risks involved, even if Shift is 100% legit. While it seems they are a small operation, I have no reason to believe they aren't acting in good faith. Even so, I'm not dumb enough to
assume they're doing so, and I'm taking affirmative steps to limit my liability exposure.
Hell, the biggest "red flag" in this whole situation is that they are obviously trusting their users not to buy $500 of stuff just before emptying their connected account and running like hell. That doesn't strike me as very scalable - but it's their problem, not mine.