BitPay, a Bitcoin payment processor, posts company news on payment volume, merchant adoption, developer tools like Bitcore, and chain support.
HN commenters cite it for BitPay transaction volume and Black Friday sales figures, using it to rebut critical articles, and for its gift card offering.
> Bitcoin Black Friday 2014 being a huge failure
No, BBF 2014 was a huge success: "we saw an 82% increase in the number of merchants who completed transactions compared to last year’s BBF", "Both Gyft and NewEgg experienced their best day of bitcoin sales ever" - http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/12/09/bitcoin-black-friday-2014-recap.html
> every vendor I've seen comment on sales has said there have been pretty much none this year
You are wrong, which is why you quote no source. 2014 was the best year ever for bitcoin sales. See the BBF numbers above. CheapAir recently passed $1.5 million in bitcoin sales (http://www.coindesk.com/cheapair-litecoin-dogecoin-flights/). Newegg, although they quote no numbers, was sufficiently pleased with their Bitcoin sales that they decided to accept them in Canada in August. Same thing for Overstock who decided to expand bitcoin acceptance to their international market.
> Bitcoin solves problems that most people don't care about(freedom) and creates problems they do(security).
Bitcoin solves a lot more than that. You must not be very familiar with it. I will give you 2 basic examples. The most important problem that Bitcoin solves is fraud: a merchant who receives a payment in bitcoins can be assured it won't be "charged back" or "cancelled" due to fraud, because Bitcoin payements are cryptographically irreversible. So once a merchant receives a payment in Bitcoin, the product or service can be shipped or executed ASAP with no risk of fraud.…
I was a co-founder of TAV (we built and sold 3 TH/s of ASIC miners in Sept 2013). This journalist, Matt O'Brien, clearly has done little research on Bitcoin and is not familiar with mining operations. His article contains lies, fallacies, and personal opinions that do not reflect reality.
"What are [venture capitalists] supposed to say, though, when they've bet hundreds of millions of dollars on it?"
Fallacy number one. If VCs were merely praising Bitcoin with no (or very few) investments, the journalist would say "well why don't they put their money where their mouths are?". Now they do put their money on it, but he says "well what else are they supposed to say?".
"It's fallen 36 percent the past two days, as you can see below, with a 24 percent decline the past 24 hours."
This is hardly newsworthy. What he seems to forget or point out is that Bitcoin is and has always been volatile --no one denies it. There has been dozens of instances where BTC lost (or gained) 20% or more in a span of 24 hours. Today's drop is no different than the other ones.
"It's too bad Bitcoin doesn't have a central bank to help stabilize its value."
This is very ironic to write 2 days after the Swiss central bank themselves caused an appreciation of the CHF of 30% in mere hours, hurting Swiss exports badly.
"It has no inherent value"
Another journalist who fails to realize no fiat currency has any inherent value either. Currencies (whether fiat or crypto) have value because people…
> But the transaction volume in USD
This is again irrelevant to the point the OP and blog post author were making. If the number of tx/block continues to increase, then the current level of network security will increase, all else being equal (eg. USD price of Bitcoin staying flat).
> on a 6-12 month timescale bitcoin has been absolutely terrible investment
Absolutely, but long price downtrends have happened multiple times in the past. That's why I asked "what makes you think this bubble, as opposed to the last N bubbles, is clearly different and clearly marks the end of Bitcoin?".
> which you did use as an example
Well I didn't, the OP did :)
> There is no mention whatsoever on how many purchases they have that is being made with bitcoin.
I was pointing to these slides because they show a multitude of metrics increasing. It seems unlikely bitcoin purchases would be declining given everything else is increasing: number of bitcoin startups, number of wallets, number of merchants, number of daily tx, etc. Individually these metrics mean little, but all combined... Heck we went from 0 to 100,000 merchants since 2009, so it is certain bitcoin purchases have increased in that time frame. Why would you doubt that?
> Do you happen to have any data about the purchases made specifically with bitcoin?
Very few merchants publish their bitcoin metrics. But 2 come to mind: Gyft and Newegg said that their 2014 Bitcoin black friday sales were the best ever:…
In one post your criticism is that there is a lack of research, and I agree. But now you're making unsubstantiated claims again... the damage done to bitcoin? All meaningful metrics from BitPay's transaction volume [0] to on chain USD volume [1] to the price [2] shows that Bitcoin is doing fine and does not need saving. Public data shows that even though a fee market is developing, Bitcoin is still rising quickly in use and value.
As for the 1GB block research you're talking about, it was literally presented 5 days ago. S2X proposal started in May and the fork was planned for next week. The way we want this secure digital money thing to work is that proposals that are controversial or that may affect security are researched and the research is reviewed over many months or years.
I know you want to take the quick approach and just LOWER FEES NOW, but we know -- from experience -- that a cowboy attitude with blockchains makes it trivial to lose a lot of money [3].
[0] https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/
[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume-usd?daysAverageString=7×pan=2years
[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin/#charts
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-have-frozen-280-worth-of-ether-on-parity-wallet.html
The largest Bitcoin payment processor for retail is Bitpay, I've used them on a few websites. They enable shops to accept Bitcoin with a locked in exchange rate, shielding them from the volatility and the need to even hold and manage cryptocurrency. They charge a 1% settlement fee, which I believe is competitive compared to traditional payment processors.
Hard to say what proportion of transactions are retail driven, but Bitpay did write about their progress towards a $1B annual payment volume milestone recently[1] which is a drop in the ocean compared to the multi-billion dollar daily trade volumes on exchanges.
[1] https://blog.bitpay.com/bitpay-growth-2017/
bitcoind is not designed to scale at all. Just look at the transaction malleability issue that has been terrorizing the exchanges. This has to do with them writing shitty wallet software to overcome bitcoind's limitations.
We need more implementations that interact with the blockchain that work at scale. However, this Bitcore just seems to sit on top of bitcoind, making it not very interesting imho [1]
It is designed to run server side on node.js or client
side in a web browser and interect with a trusted bitcoin
node (i.e. a bitcoind instance)
1. http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/02/14/introducing-bitcore.html