Anyone with half a brain knows the NSA and other agencies have been capturing data from telcos for decades. That's the nature of their business. And frankly, given the world we live in and the amount of sick fucks roaming the land, I don't blame them for doing some intelligence work. PRISM, MUSCULAR and whatever else we don't know of (yet) are without a doubt abuses of power and they have simply gone way too far. So this is wrong and needs to be changed. But the Internet will never be the Internet of the 90s.
Companies like AT&T have dedicated rooms for the NSA with spliced fiber to dumb daily terabits of data to. For decades. This is nothing new.
with regards to payments and consumer awareness of breaches and security issues, well, consumers today are becoming more AWARE of these facts brought on primarily by the Snowden leaks. Sure, a lot are still clueless and that won't change but there is still an inherent reluctance to trust new products/services/technologies especially when it comes to banking and finance.
The status quo are not early adopters. Never have been, never will be. The mainstream products are the success. When you sign up for an Amex or a Chase card or whatever bullshit they're selling on TV, they sell a sense of security, confidence, TRUST.
The problem with a startup like Coin (aside from the dozen or so issues mentioned above by me and a few others reading the thread now) is a narrow focus. They aren't really solving a problem, rather they're creating many more.
They've created a product that a handful of people in the SF Mission district will use to buy a $7 coffee and a croissant while they Tweet about it (from the Coin app hopefully). But this focus forgets the rest of the world (which is a big and lucrative place).
I think this is the problem with a lot of Bay Area startups. They're so caught up in the YC dinners, the SF startup scene, the networking, and the conferences that they limit their focus to a very narrow audience.