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0 pointsmrb8y ago0 comments

«Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat»

Wrong. Bitcoin payments processors report growth, eg. BitPay processes $1 billion in payments per year, up 328%! https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/

The source you quoted is laughably bad: it tries to estimate payment growth by looking at how many of 500 retailers accept Bitcoin. That's like saying "out of 500 persons only 3 own (not bought) a Porsche this year compared to 4 last year, so worldwide Porsche sales are down."

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wpietri8y ago

No, they are looking at merchant growth by looking at use among top retailers. It's a perfectly fine metric if what you care about is daily consumer use for common transactions.

If you're saying, as the blog post says, that it's getting used more for other things than typical ecommerce, that's a different argument.

mrbOP8y ago

Yes there is a difference between acceptance and payment use. However they extrapolate that it's declining based on a way too small sample size: 2 retailers stopped accepting BTC so they infer global acceptance is declining... That's just ridiculous.

For all we know the JPMorgan report making this claim could be wrong, as it doesn't even list which 500 retailers it studied, and which are the 2 that dropped Bitcoin. I wouldn't expect quality Bitcoin research coming from JPMorgan anyway, as their CEO is staunchly anti-Bitcoin, so their analysts are probably not enticed or instructed to spend that much time and effort studying it.

wpietri8y ago

The largest 500 retailers is an excellent representation of the largest 500 retailers. I think it's also a fine proxy for mainstream ecommerce.

That's certainly a metric that Bitcoin advocates would have been happy with, say, 5 years ago. Then they were agitating for major retailers to accept it as the obvious coming thing.

The fact that new major merchants are not joining and old merchants are going to the trouble of taking it out is a sign that earlier vision was flawed.

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0 pointsmrb8y ago0 comments

«Merchant acceptance is actually in retreat»

Wrong. Bitcoin payments processors report growth, eg. BitPay processes $1 billion in payments per year, up 328%! https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/

0 comments

wpietri8y ago

No, they are looking at merchant growth by looking at use among top retailers. It's a perfectly fine metric if what you care about is daily consumer use for common transactions.

If you're saying, as the blog post says, that it's getting used more for other things than typical ecommerce, that's a different argument.

mrbOP8y ago

wpietri8y ago

The largest 500 retailers is an excellent representation of the largest 500 retailers. I think it's also a fine proxy for mainstream ecommerce.

That's certainly a metric that Bitcoin advocates would have been happy with, say, 5 years ago. Then they were agitating for major retailers to accept it as the obvious coming thing.

The fact that new major merchants are not joining and old merchants are going to the trouble of taking it out is a sign that earlier vision was flawed.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse