Number of Merchants Accepting BTC Payments Surged by 174% in 2023

[Renampun]

...

Despite the raised percentage being really expressive (174%), it doesn't translate in great numbers when we conclude there are only 9926 businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment method in the world.

In your opinion, why do you think more businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment method are concentrated in American and European continents?

In European countries and also America, the adoption rate for Bitcoin is quite high, apart from that the infrastructure they have is also supportive, whereas in other continents such as Asia or Africa, there are still many countries that do not have clear regulations regarding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies they consider only fiat should be used as a transaction tool.
with the adoption of bitcoin continuing to occur in European countries and also America, this will automatically encourage other countries to consider using bitcoin as a way to improve the economy of their citizens, but the thing that in my opinion will have a negative impact on bitcoin when adoption occurs is fees will definitely rise high, and that will already happen in 2023 when the ordinal protocol appears.

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[Agbe]

This is very good news because Bitcoin is getting stronger and getting more popular but for those who are accepting Bitcoin as a part of their method option are mostly in the advance countries and not the African countries. Though some countries in Africa have accepted to use Bitcoin but the people that are accepting it in their shops or stores are very few and it not up to 0.001% . And if really every shop accepts Bitcoin in my location and I can use it to pay transport then we have indirectly killed fiat currency because people will be using Bitcoin more than the fiat currency. And the economy of the country will be stabilized to some extent.

[serjent05]

Away from government regulation and all that, the biggest thorn to Bitcoin adoption is the recent surge in transaction fees caused by the ordinal spam on the network and I believe we are yet to see the worst during the bull run. If that is not addressed, I see very many merchants opting for altcoins instead as a mode of payment.
Nobody in their right mind is going to spend $20 in fees every time for just a payment of $3.

There's this thing called the Lightning Network. Nobody is going to be doing on-chain transactions for buying things, that would simply make no sense.

And nobody in their right mind is going to be accepting altcoins as a mode of payment.

It looks like there are merchants who are not in their right mind because some mechants I saw online also accept altcoin as an option for their payment.  Some of them are also accepting ETH, BNB and other established altcoins.  Although their main cryptocurrency to accept is BTC.

Bitcoin is going to be the only thing that gets widely used as payments. Altcoins are random tokens nobody cares about that serve no purpose accept for trading. They will never be a payment method. Please don't tell me you still think altcoins are trying to compete with Bitcoin as money, that ship sailed like 5 years ago once the market figured out that altcoins are nothing like Bitcoin. If every altcoin suddenly disappeared tomorrow that would have zero effect on the future of digital payments.

Bitcoin for sure will be the main cryptocurrency for cryptocurrency payment options but in times of transaction fee surge, merchants will gladly continue to accept cryptocurrency so they put an alternative from Bitcoin to not disrupt their sales transactions.  As stated in the earlier reply, no one in their right mind will pay 10 plus dollars for a transaction worth $3 or less.

I wonder how many merchants discontinue accepting Bitcoin when the ordinals transaction spam attack is at its height.  I wish that the article was precise in that it also mentioned the decline of merchant percentage during the late quarter issue of high transaction fee.  Regardless, it is always great to know that Bitcoin is moving forward to mass adoption,

[Baofeng]

This is very good news because Bitcoin is getting stronger and getting more popular but for those who are accepting Bitcoin as a part of their method option are mostly in the advance countries and not the African countries. Though some countries in Africa have accepted to use Bitcoin but the people that are accepting it in their shops or stores are very few and it not up to 0.001% . And if really every shop accepts Bitcoin in my location and I can use it to pay transport then we have indirectly killed fiat currency because people will be using Bitcoin more than the fiat currency. And the economy of the country will be stabilized to some extent.

Yes, it's mostly in Europe, and If I'm not mistaken, Germany has been one of the countries that readily accepted Bitcoin since 2018 whether online or offline. But in Africa although it's one continent wherein there are a huge explosion or growth as far as bitcoin usage, only few are accepting it same as Asia.

Just to insert though, with the issues of high fees and mempool congestion, there could be some stores that might no longer accept or stop it for the meantime although LN could be a good alternative. But let's say, bitcoin is fairly young, and maybe in the next 10 years it will stabilized and use as how it was designed by Satoshi, as a payment scheme.

[Assface16678]

Well maybe because bitcoin is more exposed or known in american and european country, why bitcoin is being used and know in other country but their government are hesitant and doesn't have idea about the existence of bitcoin, that's why business can't adopt bitcoin or crypto currency payment method, while in america an europe in this country even the government doesn't fully adopt and accept crypto currency its up to the business on what payment method they will allow and yes most businesses in this 2 country arr taking a bold decision by adopting crypto currency payment, maybe a part of their strategy as in these country there are a lot of cryptocurrency holders or investors so it is not surprisingly thay these countries is stated to have a high percentage of business who accepting crypto currency payment method, its not an easy implementation but still someon is starting this kind of system which is a good indication that more and morr business might adopt crypto payments.

[wallet4bitcoin]

This shows that we are gradually winning the massive adoption course. The adoption of BTC and its payment system across the globe will be fast paced when the globe properly understand the concept behind the technology.

Satoshi's vision to have a decentralised system void of trust on a digital scale and having an immutable ledger is just about what an average person yearns for but they are yet to understand that a room has been created for such yearnings in the tech space.

[thecodebear]

Away from government regulation and all that, the biggest thorn to Bitcoin adoption is the recent surge in transaction fees caused by the ordinal spam on the network and I believe we are yet to see the worst during the bull run. If that is not addressed, I see very many merchants opting for altcoins instead as a mode of payment.
Nobody in their right mind is going to spend $20 in fees every time for just a payment of $3.

There's this thing called the Lightning Network. Nobody is going to be doing on-chain transactions for buying things, that would simply make no sense.

And nobody in their right mind is going to be accepting altcoins as a mode of payment.

It looks like there are merchants who are not in their right mind because some mechants I saw online also accept altcoin as an option for their payment.  Some of them are also accepting ETH, BNB and other established altcoins.  Although their main cryptocurrency to accept is BTC.

Bitcoin is going to be the only thing that gets widely used as payments. Altcoins are random tokens nobody cares about that serve no purpose accept for trading. They will never be a payment method. Please don't tell me you still think altcoins are trying to compete with Bitcoin as money, that ship sailed like 5 years ago once the market figured out that altcoins are nothing like Bitcoin. If every altcoin suddenly disappeared tomorrow that would have zero effect on the future of digital payments.

Bitcoin for sure will be the main cryptocurrency for cryptocurrency payment options but in times of transaction fee surge, merchants will gladly continue to accept cryptocurrency so they put an alternative from Bitcoin to not disrupt their sales transactions.  As stated in the earlier reply, no one in their right mind will pay 10 plus dollars for a transaction worth $3 or less.

I wonder how many merchants discontinue accepting Bitcoin when the ordinals transaction spam attack is at its height.  I wish that the article was precise in that it also mentioned the decline of merchant percentage during the late quarter issue of high transaction fee.  Regardless, it is always great to know that Bitcoin is moving forward to mass adoption,

I'm not saying nobody will ever accept altcoins. But its never going to become a thing. Nobody wants to bother taking random crypto tokens as payment lol.

Merchants don't accept bitcoin because barely anyone in the world uses Bitcoin so it's not even worth their time to set it up and maintain it as a payment option yet. So why would they ever start adopting random crypto tokens that have barely any usage at all. They won't. It'd be silly.

The rare merchant these days that accepts bitcoin along with a few random alts probably doesn't have a clue about the differences between bitcoin and other cyryptocurrencies so they just accepted a few of the more popular ones. Sort of like how it became popular to lump Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and BCH together when companies tip toe into the cryptocurrency world (whether accepting as payments or opening up investment services) simply because they don't know any better and Litecoin used to be important and BCH was never important but at least was valuable for a few months so those four sort of became the "main cryptocurrencies" in some people's minds who don't actually know anything about crypto and haven't noticed two of those are entirely irrelevant these days. But anyone in the market would laugh at the idea of lumping random stuff like LTC and BCH in with BTC and ETH.

But as I said nobody in their right mind is going to be accepting alts as some legitimiate form of payment and alternative to bitcoin.

The idea that alts can simply replace bitcoin because they have smaller fees is based on not having an understanding about the vast difference between bitcoin and crypto. Bitcoin is money. Crypto ain't. Crypto will never be used for payments. Crypto is for trading and for messing around with individual crypto apps. It is very far from being money and merchants aren't ever going to accept it as money (with the possible exception of merchants directly in the crypto world, like obviously something built on Ethereum will take Ether or whatever random token its built to be used with).

Sure the occasional merchant will experiment with them simply because they don't know what they are doing. But there is only one cryptocurrency that is money and could ever widely be used for payments, hence why I said the idea that altcoins would be accepted is crazy, cuz it is lol.

[GreatArkansas]

I remember last 2017-2018 bull run, we also experienced this. Some businesses started to accept but later on, when the traffic increased in the Bitcoin network the transaction fees started to become expensive also, some businesses started to halt their Bitcoin payment support.
I can see it's normal, it will still be the decision of the businesses.

[AHOYBRAUSE]

Still such a small number.
Most of the merchants accepting btc and others must be in Asia I think.
Japan I see the btc payment option quite frequent to be honest, sometimes even at bigger department stores, which is very surprising.
In 2020 I bought my new macbook at a department store with btc, even got a low % discount because of choosing btc as a payment option. 

And on our latest ski trip to Hokkaido I saw it as an option in a ski resort restaurant, it has come a long way.

This year I was in Hong Kong twice and while I already consider it an absolute crypto hot spot anyway because of the many ATPs and exchange shops I was also pleasantly surprised by the many shops that accepted crypto. I hope in 2024 it will grow much more than just 1,74x!

[anushkasachith888]

what are some popular merchants that accept btc payments?

There are many popular merchants that accept Bitcoin payments. Some of the major companies that accept Bitcoin as payment include Microsoft, AT&T, Burger King, KFC, Overstock, Subway, Other popular merchants that accept Bitcoin payments include Pizza Hut, Starbucks, Rakuten, and many more
The number of global merchants accepting Bitcoin as a payment method increased nearly threefold in 2023, reaching around 9,926 merchants by the end of the year, I think hopefully we can see more merchants will accept bitcoin in this year.

[Lucius]

Correct me if I'm way off base, but if a merchant accepts crypto at all, they're most likely using a payment processor like Bitpay which by default allows you to pay with coins other than bitcoin--and if that's true, then there would be no logical reason for anyone to pay with bitcoin when network fees are so absurdly high.

A few posts above yours, I quoted a part from the article posted by the OP, and there you can see that only a little less than 50% of sellers accept LN, which means that for those who have the knowledge, paying with Bitcoin can actually be much cheaper than fiat. Payment processors are something that definitely makes sense for on-chain transactions considering the volatility that is present with Bitcoin.

~snip~
But I've always questioned people's willingness to spend their bitcoin on goods & services when fiat works just fine.

Sometimes that also makes sense, because usually people like to spend Bitcoin when they have profited from it - so all those who, for example, invested when the price was around $20k or even lower, may not even see a problem in paying $3-$4 for fee in case that the value of the transaction is several hundred $.

[Shishir99]

The high transaction fees have been a problem lately and will drastically reduce the number of transactions that the Merchants will carry out these few months we have been experiencing high fees. They may stop transactions in Bitcoin if fees go way high than what we have currently, instead will start using other cryptos like LTC, XRP and the rest of them that have lower transaction fees in running their businesses.

Yes. That's what I was talking about. Good to see that Bitcoin adoption is increasing every year. But, if transaction fees increase every day, merchants won't dare to accept Bitcoin as a payment method. We all were expecting the fees to go down a little bit, but it seems some ordinals started to pump again because Bitcoin is pumping.

More market movements lead to more transaction volumes, which leads to a congestive mempool. The fee increased to 80 sat/vB at this moment which is high already. But, it may go up further. Now, let's see if merchants open lightning networks to accept Bitcoin payments.

[uneng]

But in Africa although it's one continent wherein there are a huge explosion or growth as far as bitcoin usage, only few are accepting it same as Asia.

That is what I observed and thought intriguing. Personally, my first assumption when following bitcointalk forum and observing the userbase of crypto related sites, my conclusion is that Bitcoin is much likely to be stronger and more popular in African and Asian countries, because there are lots of people from these continents around, while even though I see people from American and European countries present on the community as well, they seem to be less in numbers. However, when we check businesses which accept BTC as currency, the reality is the opposite.

Now I don't know anymore if it was just my personal impression, or if the point is that Africans and Asians are really more into crypto industry than everyone else, although they don't have where to spend their coins and tokens at local businesses.

[Z-tight]

And if really every shop accepts Bitcoin in my location and I can use it to pay transport then we have indirectly killed fiat currency because people will be using Bitcoin more than the fiat currency. And the economy of the country will be stabilized to some extent.

BTC cannot 'kill' fiat and that is not even what it was created for, BTC is p2p electronic cash that is an alternative to fiat, so even if mass adoption becomes a reality, people would still use fiat currency more than they use BTC, take note also that BTC does not stabilize economies. High tx fees is also another reason why BTC cannot be used widely for payments, nobody wants to spend $3 on tx fee because they want to make a payment of $20.

[_BlackStar]

In my opinion - this is a sign that bitcoin will further spread its wings to gain wider adoption. Many countries have considered adopting bitcoin as a means of payment - but countries such as Asia and Africa have not done so due to regulations. But I am sure – many countries on these two continents will consider adopting bitcoin if many other countries have already started it and benefited from it.

Maybe - such countries need more time to assess and consider adoption, but should not lag far behind many other countries that are already moving forward in the industrial sector. We may soon get more countries announcing that; they are starting to adopt bitcoin instead of just legalizing its trading.

[nelson4lov]

~Snipped
In your opinion, why do you think more businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment method are concentrated in American and European continents?

Possible reasons:

• High costs of transactions — it's impractical especially in smaller, developing countries for costs of transaction for a single tx. Slower confirmation times too, is an inherent issue. There's almost no reason to transact in Bitcoin vs traditional payment methods
• Adoption rate still low despite decent growth — there is only a subtle increase in adoption of Bitcoin in developing countries.

Businesses survive if they make profit but they won't be able to price their goods at a favorable rate due to the additional costs bitcoin adds as transaction fees. Faster confirmation times and ultra low transactions fees will push bitcoin adoption by businesses.

[Ben Barubal]

   "5,107 accept lightning-powered Bitcoin payments." I'm just curious here: is the process fast? All I know is that most merchants who accept Bitcoin payments are actually from Europe. But there are still many countries that are not that open to Bitcoin being used as a payment method in businesses.

   Then, when there is a crisis in Bitcoin fees due to ordinals and inscriptions like what happened recently, will it still be good to make Bitcoin a payment method when the fee deducted from the transaction is expensive?

[rodskee]

This shows that we are gradually winning the massive adoption course. The adoption of BTC and its payment system across the globe will be fast paced when the globe properly understand the concept behind the technology.

It is what we need to take for serious now because Merchant from here and there are accepting
bitcoin now and also other altcoins are available in many merchant but what I wanna see in my place is that crypto will
also accepted and not just limited places.

Satoshi's vision to have a decentralised system void of trust on a digital scale and having an immutable ledger is just about what an average person yearns for but they are yet to understand that a room has been created for such yearnings in the tech space.

Satoshi's plan is taking place now , though recently another trouble comes to bitcoin as the
congestion really hurt users and consider using altcoins now instead of bitcoin that is why some changes may take place
 if the miners wanted bitcoin to stay on top of al altcoins.

[Lucius]

"5,107 accept lightning-powered Bitcoin payments." I'm just curious here: is the process fast? All I know is that most merchants who accept Bitcoin payments are actually from Europe. But there are still many countries that are not that open to Bitcoin being used as a payment method in businesses.
~snip~

Transactions that go through LN are instant, when you receive an invoice, you simply make the payment and everything is done in a few seconds. And as for merchants, it is true that there are a lot of them in Europe, but North, Central or South America is not far behind. These data are publicly available and you don't have to guess where the most of them are.

https://btcmap.org