Is Bitcoin payment processors helping with the adoption?
My concern is merchants that accept Bitcoin as a form of payment use these payment gateways. to my knowledge these payments processors pay USD or some sort of fiat back to the merchants. Putting aside the publicity Bitcoin gets it only takes Bitcoins from customers, sell it at the market price and pay the merchants.
This might not be a bad thing But we basically exchange exposure with extra selling pressure.
Or this exposure brings in more Byers.
It's not selling pressure at all. The buyers when they are buying any goods essentially are letting go of their coins in exchange for something else. The merchants exchanging it to USD contributes nothing to the selling pressure on the larger scale.
But this has been a question that I've been thinking about as well, whether payment gateways are really helpful in allowing merchants in particular in adopting bitcoin.
It definitely does simplify the steps for the merchant to set up and accept bitcoin payments, which is definitely a positive, as they can deal without the chargebacks with traditional paypal and credit card payments. However, they're not truly accepting bitcoin, but rather, just using bitcoin as a gateway for USD.
From a purely adoption point of view, it does boost adoption numbers. However, what really needs to happen in the long run is merchants accepting bitcoin at face value, without converting it to USD instantly, as that would be what brings price stability.
