Bitcoin adoption in coming years, merchants will be left behind

[Accardo]

Few minutes to my bed time, few words on the Deloitte research struck thoughts of future adoptions in me. Don't know if it's speculative, but seems like a real occurrence, we can relate to it. First on the "merchants getting ready for crypto survey", about 60% of merchants wanted to integrate bitcoin because their customers demanded for crypto payment. But, they required a payment system that can swap immediately the crypto to fiat. No realistic intention of the merchants holding bitcoin. All requirements like in customer and client relationship is entertaining the ideas of clients to retain liberties with them. And raising up such a payment system, according to the survey, would costs merchants $500,000 as of 2021. So as to Cut costs from 3rd party payment processor; fees.

Second, Merchants also realized that bitcoin also serves as a big cow, the business will milk profits from bitcoin price increase, for a long period. As of the time of the survey total number of bitcoin users slayed at 220 million around the globe. With young people, the majority. Today it has doubled to 420 million, according to a google search. With young people, retaining the majority.

Third, merchants believe that not adopting bitcoin or crypto, will affect a business growth in future. Since the younger generation dominates the market in huge numbers. Looking at the evolution, the younger generations would become older generations. Then their offspring will also have to use bitcoin, because their parents does. It will skyrocket the adoption of bitcoin amongst users, thereby affecting business that failed to learn or integrate bitcoin in their businesses.

Finally, one might say that they'll integrate bitcoin when the time comes, but the costs of doing that may have increased too. As of now merchants need about 500k to 1 million dollars to build a satisfactory payment system to suit customers and the business alike. I think, somehow, somewhere, some merchants would be dropped out of the trend.

I know of other possibilities of bypassing such payments processors, in form of an argument your ideas are welcomed. Happy Sunday!

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/technology/us-cons-merchant-getting-ready-for-crypto.pdf

[Don Pedro Dinero]

I don't think bitcoin will ever become big in day-to-day small payments, for the simple fact that it is very valuable and will become increasingly so. For that you'd better pay for the other rubbish options you'll have to pay with, basically fiat in its different variants, such as cash, cards and CBDCs or shitcoins, when payment is implemented. Not for nothing does the article conflate 'crypto' with bitcoin.

[kryptqnick]

Well, it's understandable that merchants are concerned about Bitcoin's volatility and prefer fiat because of its (real or perceived) stability. Another reason might be that of practicality of legally doing business: if it's fiat in and fiat out on your part, and the crypto part is handled by someone else, you don't need to worry about how to declare income from purchases in cryptos, whether any additional taxes (capital gains, for example) need to be paid, etc.
I'm still not sure how people who legally accept Bitcoin payments deal with the tax side of it, and whether it's worth it.

[tbct_mt2]

Few minutes to my bed time, few words on the Deloitte research struck thoughts of future adoptions in me. Don't know if it's speculative, but seems like a real occurrence, we can relate to it.

The participation of Deloitte is great because they are top four in audits and I see we actually need their participation in cryptocurrency market. They with their company sizes surely don't want to take risk with cryptocurrency because they know if they do something wrong with audits, their companies will collapse like Enron and their audit company, MCI.

MCI, Inc. (formerly WorldCom and MCI WorldCom)
Enron.

What do you think about future of Deloitte if they audited FTX and the exchange gone after a few days? Deloitte will go to the hell as well and I am sure they won't take risk with cryptocurrency companies, exchanges too soon.

Anyway this report from them is good signal that they are slowly changing their standpoint on cryptocurrency.

[stompix]

Second, Merchants also realized that bitcoin also serves as a big cow, the business will milk profits from bitcoin price increase, for a long period. As of the time of the survey total number of bitcoin users slayed at 220 million around the globe. With young people, the majority. Today it has doubled to 420 million, according to a google search. With young people, retaining the majority.

Users?
If they are going to say, people that own crypto, maybe! Users as in using, no!
Bitcoin manages 400 000 transactions a day, that would be 12 million a month, add 6.599.553 let's say double the numbers with altcoins and you have the 400 million users doing ...one tx every 10 months! That's almost saying as there are 2 billion Christmas tree users!

But let's not trust numbers and go over a topic in this forum that should be full of "users" !?
What is the most weird thing you bought with crypto?

Nah, I'd say keep that crypto and let it grow.
I haven't spend cryptocurrency to purchase something because I feel their is no need to spend cryptocurrency
Almost similar case with you, I don’t fancy buying stuffs with bitcoin
I never even think too much about what to purchase with crypto,
Honestly, I view bitcoin as an investment, a potential future asset, so I have never and do not want to use bitcoin to buy anything.

And the rest are VPNs and gift cards!

Merchants left behind, unfortunately, and painfully it's the users that get left behind, as merchants offer the payment gateway, suddenly everyone that demanded that is thinking wow good news BTC it's going to go up in price by another 25% it would be stupid to spend and the merchants seeing no customers disable the payment option!

What deloitte failed to take into account was greed, they were still in their scenario treating it like a currency when it's like 90% investment now.

I don't think bitcoin will ever become big in day-to-day small payments, for the simple fact that it is very valuable and will become increasingly so.

It will the moment you can't imagine it going another 100% up in a year.
It's much like currencies in countries like Zimbabwe or Argentina, once you get the payment you immediately rush to either exchange it or buy stuff as you know the value of the usd/your shitty currency is going to go up,  once there is no such thing and the gains are in the 1-2% people will stop doing it.
Now everyone is focused on the bullrun so merchant adoption is a dream!

[Don Pedro Dinero]

It will the moment you can't imagine it going another 100% up in a year.

But do you see that happening soon? I think it could be at least 3 cycles away. Another thing is that, yes, if in say 15 years' time the price is fairly stable and bitcoin ownership is much more widespread than it is today, people will spend it for day-to-day payments, but that would require something else as well: favourable regulation. As things stand with most regulations today, every time you spend bitcoin you are triggering a potential taxable event. If at that moment the price is higher than when you bought it, you will have to pay capital gains tax or the one that corresponds to your legislation.

Without legally considering it as a currency or setting minimum exemptions for small payments, and with the growing KYC it is going to be much less complicated to pay with fiat or its anti-privacy CBCD.

[Apocollapse]

We're still struggle in scalability issue, rather than expecting people will use Bitcoin as daily transaction, we need to think what's the solution when the fee reach 100 sat/vbyte lol. Transitioning to lightning network is not yet achieved, if the previous ordinal attack was last longer, everyone would be forced to use lightning network because the centralized exchanges were start accepting LN.

Just like Covid-19 pandemic, it force people to stay in house regardless you're a worker, student etc.

[bittraffic]

We're still struggle in scalability issue, rather than expecting people will use Bitcoin as daily transaction, we need to think what's the solution when the fee reach 100 sat/vbyte lol. Transitioning to lightning network is not yet achieved, if the previous ordinal attack was last longer, everyone would be forced to use lightning network because the centralized exchanges were start accepting LN.

Just like Covid-19 pandemic, it force people to stay in house regardless you're a worker, student etc.

People will still prefer fiat though. And you will too since you have the option. Merchants will turn their BTC into fiat right away upon receiving it in fear of its price that fluctuates every minute. Not even minding that LN.

In the bull market, even Bitcoin users will also be converting their coins to stablecoins to wait for the price to go down. While crypto users have this option, they will always go right back to fiat for they also want to invest once again.

[DaveF]

Look at it a different way. A lot of people use wallets like coinbase / cashapp / bitpay. Like it or not that is the way it is for a lot of crypto users. We can argue good / bad but there are a lot of people who got into crypto with coinbase and never left. Same with square - block - cashapp - whatever they are called today.

These places also either provide their own credit card terminals (square) or partner with others (bitpay / coinbase) I see a future where I walk into my local bagel store (like I did this morning) and pay with cashapp (like I did this morning) and instead of it coming out of my BTC balance and going to the merchants it will be batched out at the end of the day. Much like credit cards are done now. For all we know that is what is really happening since some these apps & services to a certain extent are custodial and you really don't know what is going on in the background.

-Dave

[stompix]

But do you see that happening soon? I think it could be at least 3 cycles away.

Of course not!
It's going to be a long way and as you can see from actual usage we're just at the beginning of things!
But a decade sounds ok, I expect the second halving after this one to be a fiasco that will probably turn people from speculation to actual usage.

As things stand with most regulations today, every time you spend bitcoin you are triggering a potential taxable event. If at that moment the price is higher than when you bought it, you will have to pay capital gains tax or the one that corresponds to your legislation.

I don't see that as a problem even with current technology, no matter what you do the moment you exchange them from coins to fiat you have to pay taxes, for your pen and paper average Joe it will be a complete nightmare to deal with 100 random purchases compared to one exchange and a bank transaction but here is where tech comes in. We already have software that gets your complete tax statement from all the trades you did no matter how many on exchanges, a few adjustments where you insert your wallet addresses and based on your tx it calculates everything you own is pretty simple, and unlike normal tax statement you don't have to deal with storing receipts, they are all in the chain!

Of course, there is the actual problem, people not wanting to pay that at all, which is a far bigger hurdle!

We're still struggle in scalability issue, rather than expecting people will use Bitcoin as daily transaction, we need to think what's the solution when the fee reach 100 sat/vbyte lol.

Fess won't reach continuous 100sat/b unless mass adoption, mass adoption won't happen with 100sat/b!

[rat03gopoh]

As of now merchants need about 500k to 1 million dollars to build a satisfactory payment system to suit customers and the business alike.

Is this an accumulated cost for all existing merchants?
Bitcoin doesn't require such high fees, with its inherent characteristics it should already be a fairly secure payment system.

[Don Pedro Dinero]

I don't see that as a problem even with current technology, no matter what you do the moment you exchange them from coins to fiat you have to pay taxes, for your pen and paper average Joe it will be a complete nightmare to deal with 100 random purchases compared to one exchange and a bank transaction but here is where tech comes in. We already have software that gets your complete tax statement from all the trades you did no matter how many on exchanges, a few adjustments where you insert your wallet addresses and based on your tx it calculates everything you own is pretty simple, and unlike normal tax statement you don't have to deal with storing receipts, they are all in the chain!

Of course, there is the actual problem, people not wanting to pay that at all, which is a far bigger hurdle!

Yes, that's for sure, a widely used software is cointracking for example, but there are more.

I think that not wanting to pay taxes is not the only reason, there is also the problem of privacy. Declaring every transaction you have made doesn't sound very cyberpunk, nor does it sound like the initial idea of the White Paper. It is a problem that would be solved if it were declared legal tender, which is not going to happen in the most powerful countries.

[Accardo]

As of now merchants need about 500k to 1 million dollars to build a satisfactory payment system to suit customers and the business alike.

Is this an accumulated cost for all existing merchants?
Bitcoin doesn't require such high fees, with its inherent characteristics it should already be a fairly secure payment system.

I don't think so, from the survey each merchant requires such an amount to build a payment processor, that'll be able to convert the bitcoin to fiat. Immediate, maybe. Expected to see this question. I thought about it and wasn't sure of what they needed such an amount to build. But, to be sincere, I've not seen a payment processor like that. Even people who offer it as a service, still requires the merchant to withdraw their funds. Don't know actually how they'll want to build the system. Since they don't want to hold the bitcoin, they'll need an asap payment swap; crypto to fiat. If anybody has worked on such a system I can't tell. Weighing the worth of building such, could get to an amount like that. Building an intelligent system, that'll trade their crypto to their bank account.

What do you think about future of Deloitte if they audited FTX and the exchange gone after a few days? Deloitte will go to the hell as well and I am sure they won't take risk with cryptocurrency companies, exchanges too soon.

Delloitte's statistical performances are great, and they may have not been able to withstand the distruction auditing CEX would have brought them. Hopefully from the experiences with hackers and thieves, Delloitte won't look into such crypto departments. Currently, no one can vouch for any successfull crypto exchange to stay a certain period in the market. Without having numerous bad publicity regarding missing funds.

Second, Merchants also realized that bitcoin also serves as a big cow, the business will milk profits from bitcoin price increase, for a long period. As of the time of the survey total number of bitcoin users slayed at 220 million around the globe. With young people, the majority. Today it has doubled to 420 million, according to a google search. With young people, retaining the majority.

Users?
If they are going to say, people that own crypto, maybe! Users as in using, no!
Bitcoin manages 400 000 transactions a day, that would be 12 million a month, add 6.599.553 let's say double the numbers with altcoins and you have the 400 million users doing ...one tx every 10 months! That's almost saying as there are 2 billion Christmas tree users!

But let's not trust numbers and go over a topic in this forum that should be full of "users" !?
What is the most weird thing you bought with crypto?

Nah, I'd say keep that crypto and let it grow.
I haven't spend cryptocurrency to purchase something because I feel their is no need to spend cryptocurrency
Almost similar case with you, I don’t fancy buying stuffs with bitcoin
I never even think too much about what to purchase with crypto,
Honestly, I view bitcoin as an investment, a potential future asset, so I have never and do not want to use bitcoin to buy anything.

And the rest are VPNs and gift cards!

Merchants left behind, unfortunately, and painfully it's the users that get left behind, as merchants offer the payment gateway, suddenly everyone that demanded that is thinking wow good news BTC it's going to go up in price by another 25% it would be stupid to spend and the merchants seeing no customers disable the payment option!

What deloitte failed to take into account was greed, they were still in their scenario treating it like a currency when it's like 90% investment now.

Ordering stuffs online and you find a bitcoin payment option along masters card, paypal etc, what would you choose?. A lot of transaction go on with bitcoin. Merchants with online services get bitcoin users easily. I know people think of offline businesses, when talking of merchant adoptions. In future, people won't often go to shops, to get some products. The user you mentioned above, could be hodling. And doesn't intend to sell or purchase stuffs with his coins. The users in quote include hodlers. But, when we begin to see fancy bitcoin payment mediums in offline stores, we can easily pay with our devices. LN is helping the growth of making fast payments too. Personally, I use bitcoin to pay for different products online and have seen multiple clients ask me if I take bitcoin for my products. Hence, the responses on the thread is not enough to generalize on the way clients wants to use bitcoin. The forum always send thumbs up to those who don't spend their coins. Isn't it a criterion that can affect the responses of some users in the thread, coming up with impressive responses regarding not spending their bitcoin.

[OgNasty]

Ironically, the way Bitcoin has evolved is going to force merchants to adopt middlemen like Coinbase to handle their payments and consumers will have to leave funds on exchanges like Coinbase to be able to spend them without massive fees at merchants. This is ironic because it is the exact behavior that Bitcoin was supposed to fix.

[Odohu]

Well, it's understandable that merchants are concerned about Bitcoin's volatility and prefer fiat because of its (real or perceived) stability. Another reason might be that of practicality of legally doing business: if it's fiat in and fiat out on your part, and the crypto part is handled by someone else, you don't need to worry about how to declare income from purchases in cryptos, whether any additional taxes (capital gains, for example) need to be paid, etc.
I'm still not sure how people who legally accept Bitcoin payments deal with the tax side of it, and whether it's worth it.

There are still many grey areas to accepting Bitcoin by businesses. From what I have seen in my country, it is easier for holdlers of Bitcoin who also own businesses to accept Bitcoin than those who are not already into Bitcoin and need cashflows for their day-to-day businesses. At the centre of these challenges is the volatility like you rightly stated. Many businesses are not just comfortable with the volatility of Bitcoin as it distort their financial projections and balancing of books like in weekly or monthly basis.

The aspect of taxation is a kind of complex and various across various jurisdictions. 

[Twentyonepaylots]

Well, it's understandable that merchants are concerned about Bitcoin's volatility and prefer fiat because of its (real or perceived) stability.

Yeah, considering that bitcoin or any decentralized cryptocurrency is volatile gives merchants hesitation whether to give it a shot or adopt it. The traditional mode of payment is vastly used, and so adopting should not be their priority, but can be their alternative. Totally understandable for business owners, besides not everyone can own cryptocurrencies to pay, the economic of crypto wasn't designed for this.

Another reason might be that of practicality of legally doing business: if it's fiat in and fiat out on your part, and the crypto part is handled by someone else, you don't need to worry about how to declare income from purchases in cryptos, whether any additional taxes (capital gains, for example) need to be paid, etc.

In addition to that, government hasn't been so friendly to crypto so adopting it might be a very hard challenge for pro-crypto business owners to establish with their government, perhaps it's a crypto friendly country like El Salvador.

I'm still not sure how people who legally accept Bitcoin payments deal with the tax side of it, and whether it's worth it.

Can't think of a way to tax, might be misunderstood by the taxation as for of evasion.

[romero121]

Merchants doesn't want to be on the riskier side. Only the business people with good understanding about technology advancement will understand about bitcoin as well as its advantages over other payment systems. Even now we were able to see good number of merchants accepting bitcoin into their business, however very few prefer the direct wallet to wallet transfer whereas the majority of the merchants depend on a third-party same as bitpay that receive in form of bitcoin and settle the merchant with fiat of his/her request. First of all people aren't ready to give importance to bitcoin as a form of transaction source considering its massive growth. There needs to be transition happening with the trader to accept and users to spend.

[Ultegra134]

I don't think bitcoin will ever become big in day-to-day small payments, for the simple fact that it is very valuable and will become increasingly so. For that you'd better pay for the other rubbish options you'll have to pay with, basically fiat in its different variants, such as cash, cards and CBDCs or shitcoins, when payment is implemented. Not for nothing does the article conflate 'crypto' with bitcoin.

So do I. I also don't believe that Bitcoin is convenient to use for daily transactions, nor is it the merchant's job to figure out how to accept cryptocurrency payments. In my opinion, the most convenient way to pay through cryptocurrencies is via card providers such as Binance's or Crypto.com debit cards. There's even a thread with multiple alternatives. The main concern against this method is that it's through centralized services; I'm not quite sure if decentralization is possible in this case. I saw that Chainge.Finance offers a credit card through their wallet, but I haven't bothered to investigate any further.

[Hamza2424]

To speculate the adoption level we need to be careful, with the changing economic crisis and global politics. Although we can potentially say that Bitcoin is still a growing star, when it comes to predicting the adoption level in the coming few years, there's the need for a few considerations such as how effectively Bitcoin's narratives get public attraction, Not only hot prices but also the information of real science should behind it should be the priority of the people.

Bitcoin gets attracted in every Bull due to major price talks and analysis reports etc, a timely narrative boosts the adoption, and the young community currently finds it attractive due to its volatility and opportunities to fulfill some of their dreams, Investors consider it as a more safe placement of their money and many other with some intentions. I'm expecting a 15% to 18% global population direct adoption.

[hugeblack]

We cannot give predictions with the same accuracy for global forecasting, but we can say that more people know about Bitcoin and more people are ready to buy, which makes some store owners accept it, and over time, these traders will prefer to keep Bitcoin until it is a currency for international trade.
This prediction is happening slowly, but it is happening and may take dozens of years before it becomes a reality, and then the price of Bitcoin will have risen so much that simple traders will not be able to invest in it.