bitcoin adoptoin is growing fast
We do not know that, really.
"Growing adoption" would be more people buying bitcoin for the purpose of paying for goods and services. As has been pointed out many times, there is no reliable data on that parameter.
Numbers derived from blockchain traffic volume are not reliable, since most of the transactions there seems to be transfers between addresses owned by the same person, or other transfers unrelated to e-commerce. (IIRC, the 50'000 coins auctioned by USMS moved three times in a few days, another 50'000 moved twice, and the remaining 44'000 moved once. That is almost 300'000 BTC = 105 million USD of blockchain traffic, none of it paying for goods or service.)
The few slightly reliable sources I have suggest that the dollar value of the payments processed by BitPay has been flat or declining in 2014. I have no data on Coinbase and other processors. The mere fact that they don't quote any numbers when talking to the media suggests that the numbers are not good.
As has been pointed out many times, almost all of the merchants that "accept bitcoin" do not accept bitcoin really, they accept dollars through BitPay or similar services. So the number of dollar output channels (affiliated merchants) for BitPay seems to be growing, but we do not know anything about the number of bitcoin input channels (consumers) and the amount of dollars that flows through those channels.
We also have no idea of how many of those consumers bought their coins just to pay for something, and how many spent old coins that they had been holding for months or years. And we have no idea of how much of that bought-to-pay traffic is new bitcoin adopters, and how much is the same people using bitcoin regularly.
I posted some weeks ago the number of blockchain *addresses* that hold at least 0.1 BTC. Assuming that a bitcoin user has at least one such address, that number puts the number of users at 650'000 or less (as of the end of September). That number has increased since January, but that may be only a reflection of the price having dropped by half since then (so that more users can afford to leave 0.1 BTC unspent in their wallets).
maybe newegg should accept gold and silver as payment ..
or maybe they should accept government bonds as payment.
or maybe they should start accepting derivatives and equities as payment.
it appears to me bitcoin is more than just a speculative commodity.
Good point, actually... Imagine if someone set up a VinylPay company: "send your old vinyl records to us and we will send their market value in dollars to a merchant of your choice, for a small fee". Suppose that many merchants signed up for that service (since it would not cost them anything, and could bring in extra dollars). Would we say that "vinyl record adoption is increasing"?
- 94k bitcoin will be auctioned in the next months by US Marshalls.
- 30k extra bitcoins also auctioned by Australia soon.
- 200k recovered frozen bitcoins from MtGox could be returned to their owners at any time.
- Less bidders in the recently 50k auction, was also really bearish sign.
The 220'000 MtGOX bitcoins will be locked up at least until September 2015, which is the current deadline for the trustee to validate the claims by former customers (that they are supposed to submit until May 2015, in some way that is still unspecified.) After that, they
may be reurned to clients as bitcoins, pobably through Kraken accounts; or they may have to be auctioned in Japan for yen.
The USMS may soon auction a few more coins seized from other sites and individuals that they have arrested after the SilkRoad 1.0 raid: SilkRoad 2.0, a Dutch SR merchant (Joop?), Trendon Shavers, some LocalBitcoins guys, ... Those auctions, if they happen, would enter the USMS queue, after the remaining SR coins.
The last USMS auction not only had fewer bidders, but the winning bidders (except Draper, who got 2000 coins) were small fish who bid for 1200 BTC each, on average, and could not afford to bid for a whole 2000 BTC lot (or did not want to). The relative lack of interest by whales, compared to small fish, seems bearish too.
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