New Indicator: Number of sites accepting bitcoin

[Spekulatius]

As many deem business acceptance of bitcoin one of the -if not THE- major indicator for bitcoin's future prospects and well-being, I decided to monitor the number of sites accepting bitcoin as payment for their services/goods. I will also pursue the number of sites accepting bitcoins for donations. Continued data can be found here.

If a rising number of professionals accept bitcoin as legitimate tender, it can be seen as an indicator for future stability and possible rise of the exchange rate. On the other hand a decrease or stalemate in accepting business numbers will indicate a lack of confidence in bitcoin on the businesses site and therefore loom future decay of price and confidence.
This is the current data*:



*currency exchanges not counted; count starting from indent "4 Internet & Mobile services" to the end

The total numbers are results from additions and deletions to/from the list in between the intervals. Continuous evaluation is in progress by the many active users of bitcoin.it/wiki, although the entries on the list may not be totally up to date, due to businesses vanishing, changing their minds on accepting bitcoins or being not listed yet.
Help in evaluating the correctness of list entries is highly appreciated!
Thanks to everybody who has contributed to the correctness of the list! During my last random check I noticed some old or abandoned domains that want to be deleted from the wiki list. Keep up the good work guys (so will I )!


Download:

I will publish here the raw data used and archived for conducting the census (includes more detailed information):
Table: Merchants_&_Donations.ods
Adobe Illustrator file (graph): No. of Traders4.ai


Tasks:

Please sort out sites that SELL stuff for bitcoin and those that only ACCEPT DONATIONS in bitcoin but not as pay and therefore belong to the list of donation accepting projects/organiszations

*Results of current census biased by all multiple listings


News:

16.10.12

A BTCIG THANKS TO EVERYONE THAT PARTICIPATED IN WEEDING OUT THE WIKI!

It seems only currently bitcoin accepting sites are still on the list now. That makes the whole directory much more valuable when you look for places to spend your bitcoins.
On the other hand there is a big difference between the 1100 merchants accepting bitcoin that bitpay claims to have in its client base and what's on our list.

The big decline in numbers must not give any false impressions as the bitcoin economy is still growing with new entries and whole categories (like "Film/Movies" in "7 Physical Products" or "Insurance" in "8 Professional Services") on the list this time. Some vendors seem to have tried out bitcoin to satisfy their curiosity or pay tribute to the idea and on the fly may have discovered that their business is just not ready yet for bitcoin adoption. Others may have just liked the extra attention to their business from the bitcoin crowd but seized to use bitcoin when it didnt yield the anticipated results. They may have lacked enthusiasm and the right strategies also. Other businesses however seem to prosper with this new source of revenue. Categories such as "Decicated Virtual Servers" and "Electronics" have even grown in numbers, while nearly all others have significantly decreased after the weeding out (see spread sheet in Download section above for details).

My 3 favorite entries this month:





Judge.me provides easy and swift arbitrage of disputes of all kinds. Faster then any court and binding in 149 countries. If you are arguing with someone (maybe with your latest ponzi provider), why not give it a go with judge.me to come to a quick agreement with your counter part on the other end of the world instead of pursuing him physically? Give it a look at:

www.judge.me







Are you engaged in dangerous/potentially illegal activity that could get you in trouble, such as whistle blowing, hacktivism, human rights, leaking sectret information or similar? Then shildmutual might be the right address to aid your cause and provide you with support, once things go wrong. This young enterprise claims many years experience in public relations and campaigning for just causes, mostly for individuals like you might be. For only 4$/month they promise to ring the big bell for everyone to hear once you get yourself in trouble. And if you are unsatisfied with their work: They also offer a 12 month money-back-guarantee
Naturally shieldmutual accepts bitcoin and is proud to join the revelution. Pay a visit, because a friend in need is a friend indeed!

www.shieldmutual.com






Armory reloaded? - This online shop takes bitcoins and buys the desired gun parts for you and organises the shipment to your desired address. The inventory seems quite spartan atm but surely the friendly shop keeper may order any gun parts of your fancy if nicely asked for it. To get in touch with him/her seems the best option atm anyway, because when I tried to put something in my cart it gave me an error message. Nevertheless, to my knowledge the only place on the internet that sells guns for bitcoin atm.
Happy hunting!

www.bitcoingunparts.com



18.08.12
This time I did some browsing among the entries and look what I found:




The Church of BITCOIN! Ever wanted to know more about the allmighty and plentyful teachings of Satoshi Nakamoto (hallowed be Thy name)? Do you feel like to entering into the bond of marriage under the fullmoon of bitcoin?? Reverend Jim makes it possible for a small BTC donation. He is fully licensed by the state of Ohio to solemnize weddings or alternatively handfastings.
http://www.bitcoinchurch.org/




A kind of kickstarter that accepts bitcoin to start projects of all kinds. Not much going on right now, but in a creative community like ours, it cant take long till we see some activity on those pages. A little advise for the owner: Please link to the fee schedule, so that people know what they pay before they create projects here. Also, maybe some promotion in the development subforum would be a good idea?
https://bitcoinfunding.com/




The Holton Gallery offers great painting by Maui born Artist Matt Holton. Take a look.
http://www.holtongallery.blogspot.de/


Will be updated..

[Maged]

@Mod: Pls move this thread to speculation (and whitelist me while ur on it pls)

Done.

[Spekulatius]

thx

[GeniuSxBoY]

What's a scource?

[kiba]

What's a scource?

Source.


Also, wouldn't it be better if somebody write a program to automate said data gathering of such effort?

[Spekulatius]

What's a scource?

Oh my god! The bitcoin witch struck again  

Also, wouldn't it be better if somebody write a program to automate said data gathering of such effort?

Yep, totally agree.
Unfortunately I'm a complete no0b in programming anything. If anyone's up to the challenge it would be much appreciated

[Shortline]

Sadly, the number of btc-accepting businesses on the wiki aren't reliable indicators because the wiki doesn't include black market stuff.

I mean, it's better info than most of the technical "analysis" garbage I see around here, mubmo-jumbo with charts and stuff, but it's still skewed. I'd say Silk Road does more btc-related biz than pretty much every site listed on the wiki right now... they've got over twenty thousand members. Do you think any of those other btc businesses have had twenty thousand unique hits? I doubt it very strongly.

All the same, good idea OP, keep us updated. I used to check the trade page history every day.

[Anduril]

The trade page is not an accurate reflection of who accepts Bitcoins right now. I conducted a small sample recently of one sub-section (educational software), and found that only 3 of the listed businesses still seemed to be accepting BTC. My own unscientific impression of the market at the moment is that there are quite a lot of sites that thought about accepting BTC, but no longer do.

[vulgata]

The trade page is not an accurate reflection of who accepts Bitcoins right now. I conducted a small sample recently of one sub-section (educational software), and found that only 3 of the listed businesses still seemed to be accepting BTC. My own unscientific impression of the market at the moment is that there are quite a lot of sites that thought about accepting BTC, but no longer do.

Exactly, before we try to make any indicators off of the page, we need to have someone go through and actually verify all of them first (and check back regularly).  We have to work at the speed of Internet.

[Spekulatius]

Updated.

Although the entries alltogether may not respect the exact current status, evaluation of existing entries seems to be in progress, as I have noticed that some entries have actually been deleted, while new ones were added during my last count.
However, the work in progress seems insufficient in order to keep pace with the changes done to the lists. If you've got some time left and would like to see this indicator grow up to a reliable statement of the current bitcoin economy, I'd highly appreciate if you could check some of the entries on the lists, whether they still exist and accept bitcoin.

Thank you,
-Spekulatius

[Spekulatius]

updated

[FlipPro]

The trade page is not an accurate reflection of who accepts Bitcoins right now. I conducted a small sample recently of one sub-section (educational software), and found that only 3 of the listed businesses still seemed to be accepting BTC. My own unscientific impression of the market at the moment is that there are quite a lot of sites that thought about accepting BTC, but no longer do.

Exactly, before we try to make any indicators off of the page, we need to have someone go through and actually verify all of them first (and check back regularly).  We have to work at the speed of Internet.

And what about all the sites that are accepting Bitcoin that aren't on the list.

[Spekulatius]

updated

The good news: The Bitcoin Economy^® is still growing at steady pace.
                       I also noticed people working on evaluating valid entries on the list at en.bitcoin.it/wiki/trade
                       THANK YOU GUYS!!!

The bad news: I still am not dirty rich!

[panerai]

Wonder if there's a way to show how big Silk Road's market is

[Technomage]

This is a good indicator that gives us a picture of the long-term prospects of Bitcoin. Something to think about while the price looks for a new, and very likely final, bottom.

[quartz92]

This is a good indicator that gives us a picture of the long-term prospects of Bitcoin. Something to think about while the price looks for a new, and very likely final, bottom.

To be honest, we need a lot more than this, btc needs a major hit, otherwise it will die.

[Nagle]

If we had a list of "companies that have accepted at least 1000 bitcoins", that might be useful. Below that threshold, it's just something being toyed with as a promotion.

[Technomage]

To be honest, we need a lot more than this, btc needs a major hit, otherwise it will die.

I don't think it needs any "hit", it already has everything it needs to succeed. With all the potential in gambling, porn, gaming (these are not to be laughed at, we're talking about significant markets) and the fact that Bitcoin is great as a store of value for very-long-term. A good shield against inflation like gold, but more convenient.

This role will be more valued when the market gets bigger and the price won't be so dominated by speculation. This stability can eventually be achieved by both increased usage as a medium of exchange and increased usage as a store of value.

All of this added with the fact that some pretty neat ways of paying with Bitcoins both online and physically have already been developed and are going to be developed further. And the low fees don't hurt either.

Of course Bitcoin needs more publicity and massive marketing, but all of that will follow once the potential of Bitcoin is fulfilled further. I see the June peak as only the peak of the hype wave that had a lot of expectations for Bitcoin. That was the beginning. Now we're recovering and it'll take a long time for the economy to truly develop which will start the next wave that'll be more based on what's actually been done and what's going on, not what we expect to happen some day.

This is a long struggle and everything is in the hands of the enterpreneurs developing the Bitcoin economy. Are they going to despair because the price has been on a downward spiral, or will the think clearly of what Bitcoin can do, and work on it? This will decide if Bitcoin really succeeds or not.

[mp420]

I believe the "killer app" for bitcoin would be a payment processing service. Making smallish payments across borders is very troublesome and expensive, and I think various third parties could easily compete directly against credit card companies and Paypal.

This is what I have in mind:

A US-based company that can make bank transfers (write checks or make direct deposits) to US banks. The company holds a largish amount of BTC and USD in an exchange and hedges itself against fluctuations in BTC value. The recipients provide their identification to the company so that the payment processing company can cooperate with law enforcement and comply with money laundering laws. The money senders just send BTC (and remain anonymous if they so wish), the processing company covers its costs (+profit) with fees and then just sends the USD to the recipients. Everything is perfectly legal, I think. And even if the fees might initially be higher than even Paypal, I believe there could be demand for this service.

[Fiyasko]

Can we please get a list of all those sites?
Lol seriously, It's too hard to google bitcoin accepting merchants.