Bitcoin Forum

Just some potential show-stoppers here:


Too less known & distributed yet

Too techy

Market risks - high volatility

Operational risks - safe ?

Legal risks

Too less pressure (FIAT, Paypal,... still fine) / no business case

Setup costs

Do not know payments are not revertible / would save a lot of hunting costs

KYC...


Some other ideas  and / or contra arguments?

Well yeah, one, the most important, the one why no shop will take the time to go to bitcoin:
Nobody uses it.

I mean lets be serious I don't know how many bitcoiners are out there but I'm ready to bet at anytime that we're not even 1 million around the world.
So less than 0.1% of the global population.
Why would they even care?

well coinbase has 2mill registered customers. so i would say maybe 3-4million people(coz not everyone uses coinbase) atleast have touched bitcoin.. but as you say, ACTIVE bitcoin users i too would put at a safe 1mill constant users

I think bitcoins price over the nest few months will be very volatile in the run up to the halving.  i think in general bitcoin has a way to go yet before mass adoption.

Well, you already gave a lot good reasons.
I can add a few more connected with my country.
We don't have much bitcoin users and merchants don't have reason to accept bi9tcoin payments for only a few potential users.
Also, just a few people here heard about bitcoin so we first have to educate people about bitcoin before asking merchants to accept bitcoin.
We also have very strict financial laws.

well you need much more than few month, for real adoption, you need 5-10 years, so sit down and watch, because it's not a thing that can happen overnight

another thing to add is that you can actually need to buy bitcoin, where fiat is earned directly, you don't need to buy it, this might seem not an obstacle but it's in realiy it's an huge one

I don't expect Bitcoin usage or merchant adoption to spike in the coming months, but the general direction seems to be towards increased usage generally. Better to be ready for mass adoption than to be early to the party.

All of this were very much known already in the bitcoin economy, and because of the reasons you stated above, people most likely wouldn't want to deal with bitcoins especially with their businesses. Give bitcoin a few more years to established itself in this world economy and see whether people would reconsider.

Absolutely.  It will be quiet for awhile but it could change overnight if one big tech company adopts it for use.  Glad to be in at this stage.

Real mass adoption will need several more years.I'm not a believer of the theory that we will see an unexpected influx over night just because of the next coming crisis. It will be a long term and slowly process, something like 10 years at least if you wanna have hundreds of million or a billion users and shops all around the globe dealing with it. Sounds disappointing but that is how I see it.

at first some would think to dismiss price volatility in the OP's list, because it is not a problem for merchants, as they can lock-in prices if they want to swap for fiat.

but the price volatility affects the customers who have to constantly decide, is it now a bargain to use 3yo old bitcoins that have quadrupled in price, or hold them for another 'possible' jump in value.

most bitcoiners have not hoarded for 3 years so they are still waiting for their big payday. thus while prices are still moving like crazy, people are less likely to spend, as they are aprehensive to spend at a possible loss that 'may' turn into huge gains in the near future. and as a side effect merchants dont see as much real usage and think its not worth the hassle implementing for such low usage

Thanks for the stats.
Hard to get a good estimation on the number of bitcoiners indeed, what about all those who don't have coin base but another wallet, but also all those who have a coinbase adress or multiple coinbase adresses plus other exchange plateform/wallet. I personally have something like 8 accounts in total, wallet online desktop and plateform exchange included.

But yeah the most important part of that is the incredible number of inactive users :/
1 million seems like a huge estimation in fact!

I agree with the consumer aspect. I see that even when I'm in bitcoin since 2014 I still wonder every time I convert/use my btc "is it the good time, am I not going to lose money comparing to if I wait a month?" and hesitate a lot.

But how can merchants do that? You can accept btc as a payment and conclude a deal for a constant price? it must be a low one no?

Well you may have a point here but I would like to answer base on the country I'm residing since each one of us have different situations regarding this matter. The main problem that haven't used BTCitcoin here is their lack of education regarding how it works (that's it), simple as that. There are two shops here who accept only BTCitcoin as their only means of payment and one of them is well known and keeps selling shoes to foreign buyers as well and has been few years and haven't seen a single problem with them that exist for using this kind of payment. Believe it or not, in where I am at the moment, only few use PayPal since it's banned here and BTCitcoin has higher percentage ratio of users among other available online methods of payment (even those that are not banned here). From what I'm seeing, it won't take too long for most merchants to accept BTCitcoin as well (next 2 years perhaps will be the time frame).

I guess that's the reason why we will see more middle man solutions hiding more or less bitcoin underneath ...

merchants have their goods priced in fiat value. when the customer goes to checkout, the merchant at this point gets bitcoin valuation. Although you may think there is a 10 minute+ chance of price change, most middlemen services take the hit on that small time and base it on the time when the merchants requested the valuation, not the time the funds are finally settled.

other merchants who dont want to convert to fiat, dont care about volatility as they are obviously hoarding anyway, so short term changes are meaningless

if it has any chance that the fiat value is devaluate ... you want to store your "value of work" in other system than FIAT system.

Bitcoin is the exact answer of this.

That's why gov. want capital control (ban cahs + negative interest) ... to avoid people to save his value of work.

money must be AND ALWAYS for exchange of work and good.
it NEVER must avoid store of value.

FIAT money is hell, now.
BITCOIN is the answer of everything.

Ah ok, instant transformation from bitcoin to fiat.
But well, such a thing is a bit useless in the sense that it becomes perfectly similar to fiat ^^

its baby steps. first you teach merchants how easy it is to accept it, compared to the hurdles of setting up credit card processing contracts. and then later merchants see the advantage of hoarding.

prime example is Overstock.. first they accepted it and converted to fiat, now the CEO hoards like a maniac. and is now making his own 'stocks' based on blockchain technology and doing some lobbying here and there

...

My guess is that the reason merchants ("brick & mortar" selling to the public) don't use BTC is that it is too complicated!  Too complicated for the Average Joe to get BTC and to use it.  And the merchants themselves would have to get set-up.

franky1 wtote above that there are some 1,000,000 users of Bitcoin.  There are 320,000,000 or so living in the USA.

I think it is going to take a while...

We do buy fiat for forex purpose.Bitcoin is also consider most as commodity or a currency which is bought for selling later at high rate.Many bitcoin users prefer to sell bitcoin at hugh rate than buying anything with it.It is unimaginable that bitcoin will ever replace fiat but we may have crypto version of each fiat for online transactions

nothing against the sentiment you are saying, but bitcoin is not a commodity. its an asset.
a commodity is a raw material that can be used to make other products. (beef wheat gold). an asset holds value not because of what it can eventually be used for but because it holds its own value 'as is'.

many say gold cannot be a currency because lugging around a tonne block is impossible. but carrying around 1gram size coins can be easy to handle.

much like bits (100 sat) can be useful, once the whole capacity debate has been settled when bitcoin actually grows in real capacity.

no one is saying bitcoin will kill off fiat. but it can work alongside fiat. much like dollar works along side the euro, or yuan or pound

I don't think price depend exclusively on this mass adoption, though.

There's already a signficant demand that tends to increase and hence make the price increase as well.

Agree. I never meant to say that bitcoin is a commodity.I used the analogy to get my point across that just like commodities and fiats are bought and sold in their respective markets,bitcoin is also used for the same purpose by majority of its users

agreed the sentiment that 'whole bitcoins' are more like a speculative trade (forex/stocks/shares/commodities) much like ounces of gold is more speculative..
but grams of gold are traded off the markets and used for other purposes.

so while i personally see whole bitcoins being measured for the markets. i see satoshi's and bits being used by common people

You put it nicely. well explained. thanks

You've stated all the possible reasons for shops not accepted bitcoins. The volatility and legality issues are the major reasons but even some shops are not aware of bitcoins and some don't adopt it due to PayPal and banks not accepting bitcoins transactions. Users now only prefer debit cards to make bitcoin payments.

Not 5-10 years. I've known payment modes that are added within a span of 1-2 years itself as they became popular among masses. It depends if bitcoins can be easily added as well as very few payment methods may want to partner with
websites/shops.

Mainly shops/websites care about the legal issues as getting a license isn't that easy and they don't even know whether users would prefer paying in bitcoins or not. Many vendors select a payment mode that is used more by users but bitcoins do not have many users IMO.

well thats where payment gateways deal with the licencing and the retailer just acts as a client of the payment gateway.

its only when retailers get more involved (after sampling bitcoin by dipping the toe in the water) would merchants care about other aspects.

the secret to getting merchants interested in bitcoin is not to throw them into a 100foot hole of 10 hours of video's and 90 hours of technical discussions of code. they just need to be shown how easy it is to get a QR code, accept bitcoin and have it converted to fiat should they choose to.

once accepting it. then the more detailed stuff can happen

It's true that the lack of stability makes bitcoin a risky currency.
I for one would not dare to accept it. Because a dump on a good day can cost you a lot as merchant.

merchants who are fiat minded(100% convert to fiat) use third parties, so they are protected.

its users who decide to use or not use on a volatile day.

imagine it upto 4 million people touching bitcoin, with lets say 1million people using it regularly. but on volatile weeks not all 1 million people are spending. so some weeks merchants see bitcoin usage drop.

more realistic scenario
some merchants may only get maybe 1000 customers a week. but on volatile weeks they may only get 10 customers because people panic and decide to hoard as its not the right time to spend.

its not a direct "risk" for merchants. but can impact customer numbers

well there are 120,000 merchants. but when it comes to bricks and mortar retail stores, there are alot less.

i think bitcoin works best online. such as this latest merchant
http://worldoftanks.com/en/news/pc-browser/31/bitpay-bitcoin-premium-shop/

they have 70million customers so even if 1% decide to look into bitcoin.. thats 700,000

Implementations of services like BitPay are not so difficult but again Bitcoin is still an almost unknown subject to the majority.

I don't expect any store to accept Bitcoin as payment tool within a certain time period. It costs time to convince non-online merchants that sell our daily needs to use Bitcoin in their store. These stores will not accept Bitcoin by themselfs, they need to get approached by people who are genuinely interested in helping them set up everything, signing up to a service as BitPay. This way they don't have to worry about fluctuations of the price, and they don't have to worry about silly people that are forcing a charge back on these stores. Plenty of benefits....

the solution. if everyone asking "why is bitcoin not accepted in my local store" went and approached their local store, then things might change.

so here are some steps to increase the chances.
1. do you live in an area where there are people that do bitcoin meetups, basically know that its not just you that would be a bitcoin customer for the retailer you are thinking of.
2. if there are lots of bitcoiners near you. talk to each other and think about the main shops you will like to spend bitcoins in. (try not to pick a national chain but local stores*)
3. group together some useful links that prove bitcoins legitimacy, eg video's that dont mention silkroad but show US/canadian/european senates/committee's discussing bitcoin. links to IRS that show they recognise bitcoin. and even intro video's of how to set up bitpay/coinbase accounts.
4. approach the store individually and ask the shop workers at different times if they accept bitcoin. expect them to say no, but ask them if they can find out from their manager if or when they might..
5. give it a bit of time for everyone in your area to have popped the question to the store at different times (so it doesnt seem like a flashmob advertising campaign). that way the manager see's there might be a true demand for it.
6. if you get to talk to the manager direct or if later finding contact details. hand them the link to all the info you think they will need to get their questions asked and try setting up a bitpay/coinbase account

*point 2 is because local managers of national chains dont have decision making powers, so try out independant shops first

xD I like your precision "but when it comes to bricks and mortar retail stores, there are alot less."

Yeah indeed ^^

But online btc has its success. Probably because merchants already using online payment have already "a foot in the great world of the internet".