Bitcoin Forum

According to the news, it is said that bitcoin payment of users that use BitPay has declined from 92% in 2020 to 65% in 2021.

https://wealthybot.io/bitcoin-payments-decline-as-other-cryptocurrencies-grow/


Hope this will not affect bitcoin adoption if people that are using it for payment is decreasing?

On the other side, I am thinking bitcoin is not just a coin that can be used for payment, it can be used for asset too.

And now that bitcoin fee is that high, what I noticed is that bitcoin exchange fee is higher than actual bitcoin fee, this make people to think it is high. Even less than $1 I used to make the last bitcoin transaction recently but if exchanges are charging 0.0005 bitcoin to a high amount over 0.0012 bitcoin which is $20 and above. They are misleading people to pay high fee when it is not.

People that are using bitcoin now are using exchanges and centralized wallets that charge high fee in a way it will also discourage some people to move the coin to a private key wallet.

The reason for the high fee is because of centralized sites like centralized wallets and exchanges. To use low fee, you can use noncustododial wallet.

Bitcoiners avoid BitPay because of unreasonable requirements for KYC.
Before, bitcoiners used to avoid BitPay because they were favoring BCH and had bigger fees for bitcoin.

All in all, the fact BitPay business doesn't go so great as bitcoin payment processor doesn't mean at all that bitcoin payments would be in a decline.



If one uses custodian wallet, he pays whatever the custodian asks and - especially in case of exchanges - the withdrawal fee is big and unrelated to network fee.
I've made transaction 2 days ago and iirc the fee was under 10 cents. Now it's 5-6 times bigger if you're in a hurry, but that's still way under 1$.
Bitcoin transactions are not expensive nowadays. The reality is different than what various "friends" advertise.

And there's always LN for faster and cheaper payments.


That's correct. Also for smaller fees use bc1 addresses. And also the (legit) non-custodial wallets are usually better for your funds' safety (just you have to learn yourself to do everything correct).

Those who want to understand have long realized that more and more people are pushing the idea of Bitcoin as a store of value/digital gold rather than currency. When I say more and more people, I mean primarily influential ones like Mr. Mars (EM) who bought some 40 000 BTC, but at the same time thinks that same BTC is not appropriate to use as a currency. People are following the examples of their idols, and what that will mean for Bitcoin, time will tell.


It's called business and market economy, people pay for the service very expensively, and at the same time complain that banks are expensive - paradoxically custodial crypto services are far more expensive than banks. Of course, it's not just about making money that way, but also keeping liquidity of crypto exchanges that would be far less if their fee was below $5, which would be quite realistic.

Oh but of course, if people stop using BitPay, it means they've stopped using Bitcoin altogether now.

Coinspaid claims 2021 was its peak, growing each year in terms of Bitcoin payments processed using it. I guess they're lying.

BTCPayServer has been getting better and better, and merchants who pass through the hurdle of self-learning are saying they like it. But I guess they're lying too.

MisterTango, Coinpayment, Bitkassa are just some I've used in the past, and I know they're still developing new stuff. Would they be doing that if usage was not growing? Or are they part of the lie?

This sums it up :)
I used to use Bitpay, now I don't use Bitpay. That doesn't mean Bitcoin payments declined (I'm still using Bitcoin for payments), it means Bitpay payments declined. Serves them well!

Certain websites (like Binance) have their own financial interests to make people accept their made-up tokens over Bitcoin, and people fall for that! If only more people would use their own wallets and hold their own keys, they'd realize how low transaction fees in Bitcoin actually are. I paid (converted to dollars) $0.05 in fees for my last on-chain Bitcoin transaction.

Don't write "$0.0005" bitcoin, that doesn't make sense.

I don't think that all crypto trading platforms are misleading the people.Probably some of them.
Crypto exchanges are the same as banks.They want to make money.
They will impose high fees,as long as the customers are OK with paying those high fees.If the fees become too high,the customers will simply choose another service or completely stop using crypto exchange platforms.Nobody is obligated to use their services.
I couldn't care less about Bitpay and what they have to say about Bitcoin usage on their platform.
The majority of the people simply don't want to spend Bitcoin for goods and services.
It's pretty normal that some altcoins and stablecoins are being preferred over Bitcoin for retail payments.

 

Even more, they prefer the money stay on their platform. Also their transaction related code is usually obsolete and poorly configured.
However, I agree to OP about misleading. Most exchanges use such words related to their withdrawal fee that people think that is the network fee (transaction fee). And this makes many newbies get misled that bitcoin transaction fees are high.
While exchanges do use high transaction fees to make sure the money does arrive fast to the recipient, it's not uncommon neither to see them use less fee than the money asked from the user for that, neither pay unreasonably high fee. And of course, they'll say it's the network fee...

I wrote about it because of the news and because it can slightly indicate how people are using altcoins with low fee and stable coins for making transaction when exchanges and custodial wallets are confusing people that bitcoin fee is high but not high like they said.

I use electrum, I have used it to buy, sell, shop online. What else do I need? I know payment processors can help  stores like online stores and many like that, that is why they use it, but as for me for now, I am good with electrum.

I do not need it for now because the onchain fee is low, I can just remain some little amount on it if I see people that are interested to use it for payment, but I will need it more during when the fee is high, but bitcoin fee is still low for now.

It was a mistake, I have corrected it. Thanks.

I've been criticizing BitPay, not you. Actually, it was not even criticism, it was basically stating the reality.


I also use Electrum. I use it with a HW because I feel that this is the proper way to do it. And if I'd have a shop, then I'd probably use BTCPay.
There are almost always good solutions at hand. And we, those staying more online on this forum, usually know them.
Unfortunately I feel that we're a minority and the rest are going by what the news are telling, which can be in (too) many cases wrong and misleading.


It's not only you and be who will read this. Some can wait even until the week-end to send a transaction, some others find out that even 10 minutes is too slow. People are different, hence it worth mentioning it.

I haven't been offered to pay by bitpay in a very long time. I think I've seen it some time before boxing day last year for one merchant but there are several ways now offered by other means to get purchases done with cryptocurrencies.
Such as credit cards that convert crypto into fiat inorder so to make those payments and coinbase/paypal that now accepts crypto.
There was an article about it, from a source where you would not have imagined to cover it, TIME magazine on how bitcoin's dominance of payments have declined in the past year. Only accounting for 65% of all payments and ethereum 15% while other coins which have been added to bitpay to possibly have more people have a use for it's service in the future.
https://time.com/6139727/bitcoin-crypto-payments

BitPay shouldn't be the one that will release such news and statistic because they are not the only platform to use to pay something thru BTC. There is more activity and adoption of BTC everywhere since cryptocurrency is now on mainstream media.

It may however also make sense o use.stablecoin in paying something if the merchant accepts it. I would prefer to do the same to keep my BTC.

Bitcoin has been used as an asset and even a store of value for a long time. It's not just a speculation but it's the actual, the reality that many are using their bitcoin as their storage of wealth.
Besides, it's not only bitpay that has been the third party service out there that automatically converts bitcoin into fiat. If people are keeping their bitcoin, it only means that they don't want to spend it for purchases because altcoins are easier to spend that way.

Many people avoid bitcoin to conduct transactions if they have the option to transact with other cryptocurrencies. I would rather prefer to make payments with litecoins and avoid bitcoin/ethereum because of their high fee. But that does not mean that i would not accumulate them.
People will keep on accumulating bitcoins but they spent other crypto's. Hope this makes you understand how valuable is bitcoin  :)

I like to be prepared: if fees rise a lot, I'm too late to open LN channels. Funding LN is just like consolidating small inputs: do it when fees are low.

First if all the cryptocurrencies have various charge for the payments, we also have to consider the fact that some Altcoins generally have very less fee which makes them better to send/receive. I do think that people are not so sure when they use the Lightning network Because it's most suitable for the micropayments..plus it's only one provider we are talking about. It might have been getting better at other platforms ad well. I do think that we can actually use other options like : SegWit and then at the same time inform other people regarding the options they might have. I don't think that any other cryptocurrency would have more growth as compared to bitcoins.

Bitcoin's share of transactions on BitPay decreasing doesn't mean that Bitcoin payments have declined. They didn't release the absolute number, maybe Bitcoin payments were actually up, but altcoin payments on BitPay grew faster.

In any case, the data from one centralized service is not enough to judge the whole ecosystem, even if this service is one of the biggest players. And Bitcoin payments are gradually shifting towards Lightning Network, while many altcoins don't have similar technology and rely on stupid big block scaling.

Technically those who use centralized third parties aren't even using bitcoin in first place. So it doesn't affect bitcoin adoption at all.

Basically bitcoin fees haven't been high ever since 2017!

You are paying the exchanges (and any other similar centralized services like Bitpay) to use their service. It is the cost of using them. It has nothing to do with bitcoin or its transaction fees though.

Interesting statement because most altcoins that had a small increase in their usage had a much bigger fee spike than bitcoin. Specially these days that they are facing huge fees due to the altcoin bloodbath. For example ETH fee that you mentioned earlier has reached more than $80 on average!

I don't think they are.
Despite what it may look like, majority of people don't use exchanges or custodial wallets.

I agree. Most of the time, the reason for the high fees is that the exchanges and other custodial wallets are charging more than what is necessary. They don't provide their clients the option to choose their own fee. But it is also true that there are times when the network is really clogged that the fees will experience a spike. But this has been acknowledged and given a solution.

The rising fee is certainly one of the reasons why Bitcoin is now being used less and less as a payment. But it is now addressed with the Lightning Network. As soon as the Lightning Network adoption will spread widely enough, there will definitely be a change in the numbers.

But with the price of Bitcoin rising big time in the past years, who would want to spend their Bitcoin? Many are holding theirs tightly and even adding more.

I second your statement here! Bitcoin and ETH are costly to use as a regular currency unless we are using LN or WETH. In the market, we have much better currency for regular transactions. So I am not surprised to see the number of transactions are declining in the bitcoin network.

But does it affect the reputation of bitcoin? I don't think so! Bitcoin is still the most preferred investment choice amongst the crypto community. That's what bitcoin is great for!

It's not a big deal mate bitpay is more favorable in other crypto than bitcoin so don't be surprised and surely it cannot affect the adoption since it's not the only option we have in the space wherein there's a bunch of platforms and sites to be honest in order to spread bitcoin and very popular than bitpay. So no need to worry about that..

I think BitPay is a big player in the Bitcoin payment processing industry. So it somehow matters that the payments using Bitcoin in the platform is declining. I guess it is only Coinbase payment processing service that is larger than BitPay.

But the adoption that Bitcoin supporters are really looking forward is not the one that's being done by BitPay. Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin payment is what everybody dreams of. So whether Bitcoin payment through BitPay will eventually become unpopular doesn't necessarily mean the adoption is not growing.

Exactly. No one said Bitcoin users conduct their transactions through BitPay only. There are other payment gateways (eg: Coinpayments) merchants use to accept Bitcoin as payment method. The fact that Bitcoin's share of transactions is declining on BitPay, tells us that most merchants don't want to go through the hurdles of KYC. Crypto is all about decentralization and financial inclusion, so one would guess non-custodial alternatives to BitPay like Request.Network and BTCPayServer will take off soon. The Lightning Network is experiencing some steady growth lately, so there's that. Like it or not, Bitcoin is more active than most altcoins on the market. Transaction activity is far superior than those in alternative blockchains like Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Dogecoin, and Litecoin. As Bitcoin continues to reach new All-time-highs, more people will join the game. Just sit back, relax, and watch mainstream adoption grow like never before. Just my opinion :)

Interesting thing is that the transaction count on some of these shitcoin blockchains are very small and hasn't increased compared to before, like bcash for example. Meanwhile Bitpay is reporting an increased number of payments through these shitcoins.
The only possible explanation is that they are reporting fake stats trying to pump shitcoins they have some stake in. Since they have been pushing shitcoins like bcash, it is a strong possibility too.

I feel people are not too comfortable using their BTC for such transactions. Using myself as a case study, I would feel more comfortable transacting with altcoins  and not BTC. I would suggest that Bitpay should use other reputed altcoins like Lite Coin, Dash and other altcoins. Such that if any thing should happen individuals will not loss their precious coins.

This will not have negative impact on bitcoin in my opinion. I guess already many people might have started valuing the saving of bitcoin for future and might have stopped spending bitcoin for day to day life. valuing bitcoin for the sake of long term holding must be a highly benefiting idea in my view.

You cannot generalize it based on Bitpay data only. The decrease of Bitcoin payment usage in Bitpay probably won't happen on the other payment services. I think it makes sense if Bitpay experienced a decline since there are already many sites with the same functions as Bitpay nowadays. So, people use other platforms that offer simple requirements, fast processes, or lower fees. Sure, the decline won't affect bitcoin adoption in general. The problem only happens in Bitpay, not to all providers of bitcoin payment services.

Most merchants are simply avoiding Bitpay because of KYC. They switched to non-custodial (decentralized) alternatives that allows them to accept Bitcoin directly without third parties. Just because transaction activity has declined on Bitpay, doesn't mean people are jumping off ship. You'd have to consider network activity itself in order to determine such conclusion. As I've said before, Bitcoin is far more active than most altcoins being traded on the market today. Some merchants and customers are switching to altcoins because of the low fees and fast settlement times. But Bitcoin's fees are declining, so it should only be a matter of time before altcoins lose traction in the mainstream world. With the Lightning Network in the works, Bitcoin is on a road towards mass adoption by people worldwide. Who knows if increased adoption, leads us to a higher price per coin in the not-so-distant future? Just my opinion :)

I agree with that statement, because not all payments are through Bitpay, there are many payments that are made for goods and services that we do not even realize what has been purchased and what has not, if we start to analyze it is dif' ciil to keep track of where a BTC or many BTC is going or what its destination is, or what purpose it has, the enemies of BTC say and affirm that a lot of the BTC goes to criminals, but I think that criminals like it better fiat money than the same BTC or cryptocurrencies, because they like to see the value without lowering the price, so they are very subjective things.

Or maybe it is BitPay that failed to attract BTC users to use their payment gateway due to poor service or some other reason? People still use bitcoin. The fee isn't very high now. You can get your transaction confirmed within the next block even if you pay less than $1.

I guess they only use a small portion of the fee as a network fee and keeps the rest as their own fee. But yeah, they should mention that whenever a user withdraws their fund. Separate network fee from their own fee so users can better understand how the fees work. And no one should be using an exchange or a centralized wallet to store their coins and make transactions. If they think a little, they will know that in the long run moving their funds to their own noncustodial wallet will save them more in fees.

People should avoid exchanges that overcharge in fees. Some exchanges charge only 2000 sat for withdrawals, and that's still more than enough to pay transaction fees! As long as people keep using those exchanges, it's in the exchanges best interest to keep fees high and discourage users from withdrawing real Bitcoins.

For the record: $0.10 is more than enough too for a transaction with 1 input.

I think the answer is NO because bitpay is not the only bitcoin payment gateway and the data collection is based on bitpay users alone, so the total statistics of 65% does not reflect the total number of Bitcoin users that pay with bitcoin.
If you want to know the level of bitcoin adoption you should check the activities of wallet users active ones that way you know the percentage of Bitcoin adoption.

and he hits the nail on the head. (translation. 'he is spot on')
 though i doubt he realises what he says in regards to other offchain services that want people to keep their value locked into offchain systems. or sway them to swap to altcoins to exit the offchain systems. hopefully LoyceV will expand his thought and see where it also applies to other offchain systems.

..
that said, bitpay used to be the number one payment service for merchant tools years ago. but they purposefully added altcoin offerings which automatically bring the number below 100% and then by having steep fee's compared to other services. bitpay has lost alot of btc customerbase.

its not to say that btc has declined. its to say that merchants just dont use bitpay for their merchant tools.
now with many exchanges having merchant tools and many other services, ALOT more bitcoiners use those. leaving bitpay with the laggers.

bitpay had over 10,000 merchants using it in 2013.. by the look of the transaction numbers i dont see they still have 10,000 merchants. because if they did it would be only ~4 transactions a month per merchant.

bitcoin merchants now use other commercial services to accept bitcoin

^ If that is true which is also I have doubt that most people now are holding their BTC assets than expending it.
There is no way to have a perfect stat like this but if this is only intended for the Bitpay user only possible that they can able to trace the transactions.
In this case, I most likely believe that BTC was now storing the value not spending for the daily needs or so whatever it is. Holding is the best decision for the long term because the price becomes higher and higher, so possible BTC price will not immediately recover from the correction.

I mentioned it someplace else, but it should be mentioned that BitPay is going after a different type of business now other then small merchants direct.
They seem to want to be the 'crypto processor of choice' by getting into partnerships with existing payment services.

Here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5362990.0
and here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211012005376/en/BitPay-Partners-with-Wix-Enabling-Wix-Merchants-to-Accept-Crypto-Payments

So looking at the numbers dropping from BitPay and thinking that it means something MAY be a mistake. It could just be they are changing who they are targeting and it takes a while for the other business to catch up.

-Dave

That could be a factor if people are now securing the value of their money and that urge them to use stablecoins instead of Bitcoin. With that 1 year observation, I think it was reliable and that was too convincing that people are just considering Bitcoin as an investment, not a currency anymore. And with the existing downtrend of the price, the more they'll hold and not to sell nor it spends them. Likely, if the situation goes like this, we can't hide the possibility that instead of seeing Bitcoin become a legal tender it will fail.

Is the percentage showing the number of transactions in Bitcoin vs Ethereum and other coins or is it the volume? Because I think the volume is not less important, and I wonder what's the percentage of Bitcoin and Ethereum by volume on BitPay in 2021 compared to 2020. Also, a decline in payments doesn't mean that Bitcoin's losing popularity or anything. Even the article linked by the op suggests that it means people prefer hodling. So people largely saw Bitcoin as an investment and didn't care to use it for payments as much (if the transaction volume confirms it, and I'm not sure it does). I am surprised that Ethereum's popular for payments, though, because it often had way higher transaction fees than Bitcoin in 2021. And the arguments that BitPay's being avoided is also valid for questioning the data and conclusions.

Well, in this case it is like a sampling and when you’re doing sampling you don’t use all the materials, rather you make use of a selected few or even one of the materials as a sample. So, we don’t have to get data from every platform, because BitPay is already serving as that sample. And even without being told, you already what would likely happen in a situation like this.

When the market is going down people would try to avoid losing their money, and therefore they would leave the market, until maybe things stabilizes or the market starts going up again. If there is the possibility of getting data from other platforms, it would also reflect the same thing.

Apart from the privacy concerns and reduced transaction based on that fact one can also assume that with the ever changing and volatile market, peeps are not making much moment currently or they might be just securing the funds in stable coin to reduce the further losses. In crypto possibilities are huge. For example, different markets like NFT, Defi are emerging at alarming rate and it’s possibility that investors are converting the bitcoin or buying the NFT for future profits. However, any average investor in the crypto space will always have bitcoins in his pockets and will always convert the profits into bitcoin at the end.

With the huge rally we had in the BTCitcoin market, everyone is holding their coins thinking of a much bigger profit than spending them for transactions. Expect these situations during a bull market and it would be interesting to see the same data next year when there is a reversal of trend.

That is the mistake majority of the users are doing, it is clear that it is not safe to hold your coins in third party wallets or exchanges and even with N number of hacks, no one would change. Always use your stand alone wallet to store the coins and it is not hard to use them.

as presented by the OP, the decline of payment is via bitpay. so it doesn't include other payment channels. maybe, the reason why bitpay's usage is declining because of their high fees and now, users are finding cheaper alternatives.
also, as said above, a lot are also holding their coins for the hope that this will be good investment that can give them good profits. there are many factors to consider here. but the adoption is growing as well as number of crypto users.

Some were taking this time to try new projects while waiting for the continuous recovery of bitcoin. NFT is getting hyped on how someone can earn thru digital creations and thru playing games, there are trying to have it due at this time the market is down knowing Metaverse can improve the market condition soon. Still BTC and top or  trusted cryptocurrencies can recover whenever the market experience bear season.

Right now the market seems to be in fluctuation within specific limits. This is sign for a bullish move, and that makes people keep hold than spending. This can be a reason why there is not much of spending compared to other cryptocurrencies through bitpay.

As said the service cost through bitpay seems high. Though it is a popular service provider, more applications have existed to perform the service on the regional way. Here in my country Krypto a new one have got developed and has slowly growing providing similar service.

Even though it would be available or adoption growth becomes better then i dont still believe that circulation would really be still there in terms of volume because people would really be thinking about for having its

store or value rather than on spending it on things which you could still done it via using fiat so its up to your choice though because not all would really be having the same mindset

Some would be spending and wont be minding about investment and some would really tend to hold and wouldnt waste off their coins.

With how bearish the market has been lately, it's probable people are holding more Bitcoin than what they're spending. I think the main reason why Bitcoin transactions are declining on Bitpay it's because of its processing fees. Merchants are considering other options in order to get more bang for their buck. With KYC requirements, you can bet most merchants and customers will be looking elsewhere. What really tells us if Bitcoin's payments are declining, is the network activity. So far, the blockchain is quite active compared to other cryptocurrencies on the market.

Slowly but surely, adoption is growing for Bitcoin's Lightning Network. It shouldn't be long before the whole world adopts Bitcoin for true financial revolution. As long as the main blockchain network remains decentralized, nothing else matters. Just my opinion :)

Seriously I wouldn’t blame businesses for not making use of Bitcoin at this time. When you are running a business, you have to be careful and avoid losses, because when there is loss, it will affect your business. And nobody will like their business to go down, because that’s their major source of income. And any business that is making use of Bitcoin is running a risk of losing value, because you can sell a product, and then you lose the money just because of the price dropped.

Imagine that you sold a product of $200, and after you have gotten your money in Bitcoin, and then the price of Bitcoin dropped and you are losing $100 of the $200 that you just got from the sold product, Wouldn’t that be a loss for your business? So for now, most businesses would be considering stable coins than a coin that is volatile.

I think people are willing to spend their bitcoins more if the bitcoin price is high because this can make the value of the item less or they are only going to pay less btc compare to when the price of btc is down, I hope you know what I mean and I do not think its a valid excuse to increase your service fee just because your popular but it should have lessen because the income that they will get thru fees are still high. They should change this policy now because there are now platforms that offers the same service as them and soon bitpay users are going to migrate on those platforms because the rates are much better. I bet bitpay do not want that to happen

Just because the payments through bitcoin have decreased is not a reason enough to claim that bitcoin is falling. It could be that some people are more interested in holding it for long. So, they are not using it for payments.

That could be the case but that can also be a possibility that this is a sign for bitcoin. I mean bitcoin doesn't improve that much in terms of use case for the past years unlike other cryptocurrencies that are actively trying to create more uses for their crypto. Also, bitcoin is premium that it's not really a good idea to spend it because you're more likely to benefit from it when you are hodling it.