New Indicator: Number of sites accepting bitcoin

[damnek]

I'd like to see a list of those 1000+ merchants though (so I can support them). I've asked for it before but they seem to be hesitant to give it out.

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[kjlimo]

Probably time for an update.

[sethsethseth]

Did you guys know how heavily edited the wiki is now?  Hardly any of the sites I use are even listed on it!  MagicalTux said something about how the trade page is supposed to be a short list of merchants.  This makes sense as new users should see a list of the best sites, but there should be a complete list somewhere. Perhaps someone should make one?

I found this thread from last year "Uncensored list of Bitcoin sites", where someone made a new trade page, but it doesnt work anymore.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7258.0

[Technomage]

Yes there is a problem with this whole thing. Even here in Finland many Bitcoin accepting merchants are simply missing from that list because nobody has taken the initiative to put them there. We have our own map and own listing for the Finnish community... it's just tiresome with many lists and everyone seems to be too lazy to update them all.

I'm quite sure that the Wiki list is missing A LOT of merchants. The list is far from complete.

[rpietila]

Yeah. Few people even know that there is tax-free silver for EU citizens available in Estonia. It is the cheapest in EU and can be bought for BTC

[sethsethseth]

The wiki is fine, but we need a comprehensive directory of bitcoin sites that doesnt filter based on legality.  I would spend a lot more coins if I could find where to spend them easier.  Putting a tiny bounty on each added site would probably get the whole thing populated real quick for under $100

[Spekulatius]

Update


@ all:

Thanks for weeding out the rotten entries in the wiki!

Also, Scribe contributed his magnificent json script to count all the entries automaticallly and order them by category and date (see above).
Unfortunately he didnt finish on the project and as it is right now, the script stops to count new entries to the database since July 2012.
Scribe also seems too busy to finish his work on the script so that I could simply rely completely on it to keep the census updated. I have been busy lately also too much to do the counting last month for example and will likely be busy in the future some month long as well. To keep an up to date (even on a daily basis!) ledger of bitcoin accepting merchants (and donation receivers,..) someone please has to finish the script scribe has begun!

What needs to be done:

- The script has to continue counting
- The output needs to brush up on its looks (the goolge charts just look ugly. Scribe mentioned High Charts at one point)
- Optional but desirable: The output should be hosted somewhere (for free?) to link and display it directly in this thread (or any other site)

Thx and happy bitcoining!

[sethsethseth]

It doesnt even seem worth it to continue at this point, as that graph is totally meaningless.  I can spend bitcoins at way more sites today than I could a year ago.  We must come up with a better indicator of bitcoin acceptance.

[scribe]

Hey, sorry for being out of contact, one of those lives.

Agree with both sides - I'm happy to get/keep the script running, but sure, it's not an indicator for number of Bitcoins merchants, just an indicator of wiki activity. In fact, it'd be good to add in "churn" as well - number of sites removed as well as added, as an indicator of the "health" of the wiki page. Not an indicator or the number of overall merchants, but interesting nonetheless.

Anyway, I think I see what happened with the script - it *is* actually updating (once a day), but the stats are being added to the bottom of each section, rather than in time order, e.g.:

Code:

Currency exchanges {
total: {
2012-07: 104, // July "ends" here ... 
2012-06: 100,
2012-05: 95,
2012-04: 91,
2012-03: 89,
2012-02: 85,
2012-01: 95,
2011-12: 93,
2011-11: 85,
2011-10: 84,
2011-09: 92,
2011-08: 76,
2011-07: 70,
2011-06: 54,
2012-08: 109, // August actually picks up down here
2012-09: 110,
2012-10: 105
},

 The CSV version should list them a bit better:

http://www.exmosis.net/btctt/stats.csv

Interestingly, October shows a large dip so far. Has someone been cleaning up the wiki?

I'll try to "fix" the JSON ordering soon, plus might put the code up on github in case anyone wants to run/help. One change I'd like to do is to merge or drop categories where an old one has been renamed/moved about.

And yeah, if anyone has any bright ideas for exporting as an image automatically, let me know.

[Spekulatius]

Thx Scribe!

@all: Any ideas where to get a more comprehensive list from? Maybe crawl lists on different pages and sort out doubles to pick up on those that are not in the bitcoin.it/wiki/trade list? Is that even possible within reasonable limits of scripting work?

[Spekulatius]

In reply to concerns that this indicator becomes useless as time goes on, Id like to remind you that it was NEVER a comprehensive representation of the total amount of merchants accepting bitcoin at all. The gap between bitcoin accepters and those listed on the wiki page will naturally grow with time and bitcoin adoption. Just like all telephone connections of a town could easily be listed in a small book in the early days of the technology, but soon with mass adoption the number of connections grew beyond what any directory was capable to index. Some telephone owners deliberatly chose not to be listed, others simply didnt care. Same deal with this "central" directory of bitcoin accepting merchants (just think Silk Road )
Despite its inherent flaws this census is the best representation we currently have and if we keep in mind that with time the true number of bitcoin accepters and those on the list will gap apart we can still estimate the true numbers better then any unbased guess ever could.

I have written an inquiry to bitpay representatives in hopes to receive an educating answer to how they managed to raise their client base to more then 1100 already and who those customers are, quite obviously they have a more comprehensive list of outlets then the wiki currently provides. We may even find a way to improve this indicator with combined efforts and facilitate a better experience for people that look to spend their coins.

[sethsethseth]

I think tracking the number of real world shops would be a much better indicator.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Real_world_shops
Seems that it would correlate at a certain ratio to the estimated number of websites.
You may be able to reconstruct a monthly graph from the edit history.

[Spekulatius]

I think tracking the number of real world shops would be a much better indicator.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Real_world_shops

I dont think its a better indicator per se as bitcoin's main advantages over traditional currencies can most easily be exploited over the internet and therefore online merchants will probably dominate bitcoin adoption for a long time IMO. It seems a very valuable indicator nevertheless.

Seems that it would correlate at a certain ratio to the estimated number of websites.
You may be able to reconstruct a monthly graph from the edit history.

Agreed

@ Scribe:  Do you think you can add a graph parsing the real worls shops as well in a future update?

[sethsethseth]

You don't really need a script when there is only 50 shops, and only 3 categories.  You can just look at the wiki revision history once a month and see what got added.

[Spekulatius]

You don't really need a script when there is only 50 shops, and only 3 categories.  You can just look at the wiki revision history once a month and see what got added.

Yeah, but if we can implement it in the script now, why wait? It will surely grow in the future, by then I will be happy not to have to count them all by hand.

[scribe]

@ Scribe:  Do you think you can add a graph parsing the real worls shops as well in a future update?

Should be pretty simple - most of the code will be the same, but there may be differences in how the lists are structured (I use headings a lot, but in theory it should be a simple job...)

Will have a look soon, probably after the weekend.

On a side note, is there any way to do a Google search to find out how many sites use the bitpay code, or something similar?

[sethsethseth]

Even here in Finland many Bitcoin accepting merchants are simply missing from that list because nobody has taken the initiative to put them there. We have our own map and own listing for the Finnish community...

https://bittiraha.fi/content/bitcoin-karttapalvelu
Is this the map you are talking about?  I just googled "bitcoin kartla" to search for the finnish bitcoin map.  Google refuses to translate the page, but I see at least one shop that is not listed on the english RealWorldShops wiki.
http://vegemesta.com/

This clip from Finnish TV shows that shop with a bitcoin logo in the window.  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vYH1JH73pw

So I added vegemesta to the map.

If you start making a graph of that, we should probably have criteria for what qualifies to be on the map, as some of the stuff in the "other" category is just an office headquarters for a web service.  I think this map should only include places you can actually walk in and spend some bitcoins.

EDIT:  Is there a way to see the traffic hitting that wiki?  Don't want to waste a lot of time adding stuff if no one looks at it.

Just noticed the Russian forum is by far the biggest, with almost twice the amount of posting as the German forum, yet the map has no Russian entries.  This leads me to believe that a russian map of shops exists, but I can't find one.

[Spekulatius]

Hi B-People,

Here would be the popular "updated  "-entry; if I wouldnt have problems with my HDD right now. That means I cannot currently use Adobe Illustrator to alter the .ai file that I always use to generate the front post picture. I did however count all the entries as usual and did update the list "Merchants_&_Donations.ods" for everyone to use. If one of you would like to take the "No. of traders.ai" file from the front and just add the missing month of November to the graph with the numbers from the Merchants_&_Donations.ods file, I would be very thankful. Otherwise the next update will have to wait a couple o days till I got my shit sorted out.

Thx.

[ElectricMucus]

Hi B-People,

Here would be the popular "updated  "-entry; if I wouldnt have problems with my HDD right now. That means I cannot currently use Adobe Illustrator to alter the .ai file that I always use to generate the front post picture. I did however count all the entries as usual and did update the list "Merchants_&_Donations.ods" for everyone to use. If one of you would like to take the "No. of traders.ai" file from the front and just add the missing month of November to the graph with the numbers from the Merchants_&_Donations.ods file, I would be very thankful. Otherwise the next update will have to wait a couple o days till I got my shit sorted out.

Thx.

Somehow that dramatic drop can't be right, could it be that there were just alot of dead links accumulating and that got removed recently? Or did you account for dead links in your previous graphs?

[elux]

Somehow that dramatic drop can't be right, could it be that there were just alot of dead links accumulating and that got removed recently?

Yes.

News: 16.10.12 - A BIG 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 didn't 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 "Dedicated 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).