Don't know the the Bitpay wallet statistics, but would be interested. Any link for it?
It was at the top of my post:
http://www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/BitPay.comThere are several others, but I don't see Coinbase:
www.walletexplorer.com/wallet/I can't find an explanation of how that site works, but I guess that it looks for transactions with 2 or more inputs, and assumes that those input addresses belong to the same owner (because one needs all their private keys on hand to sign the transaction). Then one takes the transitive closure of those pairs (if addresses A and B are inputs to one transaction, and B and C are inputs to another one, then A and C must belong to the same owner too.) That logic breaks the addresses into clusters, which the site calls "wallets".
Anyway, in my opinion there are two general problems with your counter-arguments to the adoption evidence.
(1) Presented with several metrics that intuitively seem to be half-decent proxies for "adoption", you find fault with any of them on the basis of what I'd call minor problems.
They are not minor problems...
The USD volume (minus changebacks) is flat since April, and still less than January; and, among the metrics you showed, that should be the one most directly related to adoption. That metric being flat, one must conclude that the other blockchain metrics, that show increase in 2014, must be useless to measure adoption. In fact, the discrepancy between those metrics makes them all suspect, including the USD volume.
And I gave very strong arguments -- China, and the big peaks -- showing that the trade volume at the exchanges is totally unrelated to use in e-commerce.
If it makes you more inclined to see it my way, I will admit this much: I agree. We cannot be absolutely sure adoption is growing based on those statistics. They could be (partially) fake. They could over-represent non economically significant transactions. And so on.
However, they are the best approximation
we have, and by and large, they point to increasing adoption. So while I agree that there remains some epistemic uncertainty perhaps, there is little aleatoric uncertainty that adoption grows given this data.
(2) You don't really follow the Copernican principle applied to time when you only concentrate on a very narrow range in the very recent past where adoption did not soar like it did before, and conclude from it that there seems to be no further adoption - ignoring that overall the adoption metrics are significantly up compared to where they were a year ago, and
vastly up from 2 years ago. [ ... ]
In May 2013 Bitpay had a volume of 5 million USD per month processing transactions on behalf of their merchants.
(source)A year later, May 2014, it's 1 million USD per day.
(source)Time for the same spiel again? "Maybe it's up from May to May, but how can we be sure that from May to
now adoption continued?!"
Yes, I will give the same spiel again. As I wrote before, adoption surely increased from 2012 to 2013 to 2014. But I do not see any clear signs that adoption has been increasing over the last year. The most germane indicators that you use as evidence of year-to-year increase show a decrease and stagnation since January.
The BitPay wallet above shows the same thing. Here are preliminary plots of the inputs and outputs in that wallet:
Bitcoins per day, 2013-01 to 2014-11Transactions per day, 2013-01 to 2014-11(The second plot is not quite transaction counts; it is more like count of inputs and outputs of transactions that go into or out of the wallet. There are some puzzling details on those plots that I still must look into. Also, the first plot shows ~1000 BTC/day of inputs, on the average, unchanged since 2013-01; which would be 0.5 million USD/day -- only 1/2 of what Bitpay claimed above. Perhaps the wallet is incomplete, or perhaps they picked one good day in May. Note that the scale is logarithmic, and the traffic does reach 2000 BYC/day sometimes.)
The fact that Bitpay and the other payment processors are not giving monthly statistics is also a hint that those numbers are not good.
Poll
