I'm guessing an investment by a16z will be the legitimization catalyst.   I'd like to see the financial controls and provenance checking they put in--as I'm guessing it's none.  

They have none right now, but I guess this lets them hire to do that?

Also fraud prevention, risk detection, etc.

How about a provenance and ancestry tree for all bitcoins and bitcoin fractions?  You could then tell if any bitcoins (or fractions thereof) were used in any nefarious transactions, drug deals, murder for hire, blood money, or even stolen coins and you could choose not to accept them.  I can hear the arguments now:  But people don't do that with real currency.  Of course they don't, that's why bitcoin is different.   You can crytographically tie it to every single transfer and there's no way to untie it.  That second part is the key part.  By allowing transactions with coins tied cryptographically to nefarious uses, you are contributing to its enrichment. 

In theory they can do this now -- in practice they can't even figure out that they should use a transactional database:

http://pandawhale.com/post/34122/sent-3510411-usd-to-coinbase-never-received-bitcoins

I'm just kind of concerned that people see the big VC investment and instead of doing all the things and putting all the controls in to make it a long, useful, and protectable currency, people both internally and externally to the company see it as just a fanboy validation of the bitcoin brand.  I wonder if they plan on hiring any PCI financial transaction people or IT specialists.  If they have a security risk officer that understands the unique issues with bitcoin and it's encryption model.  I wonder if they have a compliance officer that takes illegally gotten bitcoins out of circulation?  Handle customer complaints?  Fraud? Reversed charges?