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> If the price stays down the transactions must go 250x. I understand you now. That's right. But my point was the price is unlikely to stay down... Anyway this
by vanzard 12y ago
> If the price stays down the transactions must go 250x.
I understand you now. That's right. But my point was the price is unlikely to stay down... Anyway this debate of whether the price will go down or up is a little silly: even assuming the price stays down it will literally take DECADES for the network to "need" to increase the tx/block by 250x to maintain the same level of security. The bitcoin reward is halved every ~4 years, so we only need the tx/block to double every ~4 years to maintain the same level of security. So far Bitcoin as MORE than met this need: the tx/block has more than doubled every year since its creation.
> I didn't say this is necessarily the end of bitcoin
You were saying you did not believe the price drop would stop. Now you are saying it will quite likely stagnate. That's quite a different statement.
> It's just that the raw numbers which we do have show that it's not really doing that well.
> [...]
> The fact that only hard numbers which we do have show poor adoption indicates that it's the same elsewhere.
Yes we know that for merchants accepting Bitcoin, it represents an incredibly tiny fraction of their total sales. But why do you think this means Bitcoin is not doing well? A brand new payment technology unlike anything else going from zero to representing 0.1% of the sales of 100,000 merchants worldwide is a significant accomplishment in my opinion. I say 0.1% because 0.x% seems to be approximately what the average merchant reports. For example Overstock reported 0.2% of their sale revenues were in bitcoins for 2014.
Also why do you extrapolate your single anecdote (WordPress shutting down Bitcoin sales) to an industry-wide trend? Why do you ignore 3 other anecdotes that contradict your opinion (Overstock consistently doing 0.2% of their sales in bitcoins = $3 million/year so they are far from stopping to accept bitcoin, Newegg reporting their best bitcoin black friday sales in 2014, Gyft reporting the same)? Why do these 4 anecdotes, whether positive or negative, matter at all, when I showed you more indirect metrics (avc.com) that obviously show strong overall adoption? The avc.com metrics may not show actual bitcoin sales figures, but clearly they indicate something.
To answer your question: I think BitPay and Coinbase don't release current numbers of Bitcoin payments processed because this is sensitive financial data for competitors. But surely VCs wouldn't be pouring tens of millions of dollars in them if they showed no growth, don't you think?