Volatility IS a bug, not a feature :)

[legiteum]

Um, what? Bitcoin transactions cost at least 10x what credit card transactions cost. They also take 100x-1000x longer. Worldwide credit card transactions can hit 100k/second in peak times

I know you know that this is untrue

Credit card instant is just authorization and would take days before the funds are moved

Holy cow. Have you never actually used a credit card in your life? How is that possible?

For the other 99.99999% of the inhabitants of the planet earth, I think we're quite aware that it doesn't take "days" to pay for something with a credit card  .

[Ambatman]

Holy cow. Have you never actually used a credit card in your life? How is that possible?

For the other 99.99999% of the inhabitants of the planet earth, I think we're quite aware that it doesn't take "days" to pay for something with a credit card  .

No. I'm not talking about payment itself I'm talking about settlement.
That was why I gave the example of binance to binance to binance that it looks swift on the surface.
It all boils down to perspective
There's always a settlement on the Backend since the fund won't automatically appear on the merchant bank. 

[Satofan44]

I understand that you’re clamoring for the volatility of Bitcoin to reduce but it’s just quite unfortunate that it would be impossible for such a thing to happen right now with Bitcoin,

Volatility is decreasing, since 2011 actually. I think it's indeed not possible or very difficult that it's 100% stable (compared to purchasing power), but it could become less volatile than gold or silver, and then it would be an excellent means to save and also to use as a currency.

Here are the 30-day volatility peaks of the last years:

- 2021: 5.84% (June 14)
- 2022: 4.53% (March 16)
- 2023: 3.53% (March 16 - there seems to be something special with this date haha)
- 2024: 3.18% (August 12)
- 2025: 2.77% (March 20)
- 2026 so far: 2.58% (February 28)

It is almost scary that each year there was actually a reduction. There were some years however before which escaped that pattern (2016 had already volatility like in 2021, but 2018-20 were much more volatile) but the trend is very stable. See here.

You are answering the user as if he had actually read anything at all here. I mean it is basic knowledge that the volatility has been reducing, and one can even ask an LLM to provide an answer on topics like this. There is no excuse for not knowing even the basics of most topics these days, it is simply laziness and greed.

The problem is the discrepancy between upside and downside volatility. Panics are still strong (they get weaker, but very slowly), while FOMO bulls get weaker much faster.

Which most respondents actually missed, as I said starting with some page almost nobody even reads your original post.

It is not really a competitor though, inasmuch you could call anything that could be adopted by merchants competitors to Bitcoin. Stablecoins, CBDCs and all centralized shitcoins are not competitors to Bitcoin -- they are entirely different even if they can fulfill similar functionality and use cases but in a centralized way.

The "merchant driven" adoption approach assumes that (mainly online) merchants will try to get people to pay with Bitcoin because of the advantages over credit card and PayPal-style payments. In these cases, CBDCs and stablecoins can be seen as competitors because they share the advantages of low fees and fast finality. Of course they're not a competitor regarding the (deflationary) monetary model, but that's a more complex advantage. So I actually think there is some competition "in the real market", but if merchants get more educated about it (as you wrote) they should adopt it eventually.

What is this supposed to mean though? I would not consider simply accepting Bitcoin as trying to get people to pay with it. I doubt that almost any merchant at all is actively trying to get people to use Bitcoin except those that are red-pilled but those do not count for this discussion. Therefore, I can agree that CBDCs and stablecoins will wipe out some of the advantage that relates to fees but what about it? How strong is that anyways? How many merchants have adopted Bitcoin only for that and would jump to the next thing if it had even lower fees than Bitcoin? So yes from the way that you have written it, I do agree that it does compete on fees but overall it does not compete at all. So the only question is as I posed, how many merchants would that actually affect?

They could already do this were merchants more educated, smarter, and more long-term oriented.  

I think the slow adoption by merchants, apart from the current high volatility, education and long term orientation, is caused by some other factors, among them:

- low experience values in the merchant community with direct Bitcoin payments (most use payment processors, which don't really benefit them compared to credit cards as they charge high fees)
- skepticism about the market potential, as Bitcoin is framed mostly as "store of value"
- some investment is necessary to accept BTC (if you don't want to use a payment processor)
- to really get people on board you'd probably need to launch some BTC-only promotions
- if they are already more educated: fear about scalability issues, e.g. slow Lightning adoption
- related: the Ordinals craze which limited the use as a currency was relatively recent
- and of course: there are still mass media articles claiming that Bitcoin could be a complete failure

Most of these issues are about to be solved or will be slowly improving, so in general I'm optimistic that if volatility continues lowering, merchant adoption will also grow, perhaps reaching a tipping point soon where BTC payment becomes really popular.

Well as I have put it, they could already do this with a low-risk approach. For this kind of thing even volatility does not matter so much, as long as it does not pose an existential problem as we have presented such a case here. Why would you, as a sane merchant who is not addicted to consuming content and information like most people (utopian scenario) care about the volatility of Bitcoin in the short term? What is actually the goal of the merchant supposed to be? Build a long-term balance in Bitcoin? Achieve better short term gains as BTC could have better returns than USD? Something else? A lot of it is going to depend on this. For me the most sane goal would be to slowly stack an amount that poses zero risk at all even if it is completely lost. I don't think much of these issues are actually relevant at all if the approach is correct like the one that I propose. Low experience in the community I would say, but not only in acceptance but also in "why". Surely there are plenty of merchants that have it adopted for whatever random reasons (and not a good goal as I have given), but they are not sharing a strong reason to adopt it for other merchants unless it brought about a boost in sales -- which is not a direct consequence, and it will be inconsistent and won't apply to all merchants.

As for the bold part, you know this rabbit hole is not for everyone and we should keep it that otherwise there will never be an end to user anxiety. And anyway, it shouldn't matter at all. The average user should not know anything aside from superficial, key and correct knowledge about these matters. Bitcoin is literally the only thing where users try to be hyper involved and hyper anxious about every possible scenario. Don't tell me it is justified because a lot of money is involved, most of them barely have any meaningful sum in it. People like you and I can discuss all kinds of hostile scenarios because they will not impact us, and we are never going to fall for superficial FUD of any kind. As you see even with vollatility here, had you presented the original post differently but still accurately -- that we are heading in a very bad place unless something changes as I presented with numbers -- you would have actually scared a fair number of users (aside from those that are dismissive just for the sake of posting whatever without actually understanding the implications of the situation).

I think you have forgot an old and wise lesson man, do not feed the troll.

[legiteum]

Holy cow. Have you never actually used a credit card in your life? How is that possible?

For the other 99.99999% of the inhabitants of the planet earth, I think we're quite aware that it doesn't take "days" to pay for something with a credit card  .

No. I'm not talking about payment itself I'm talking about settlement.

Got it. Let's review then.

Bitcoin will never ever ever be a mainstream means of making payments.

It is too slow, and too expensive, and was never meant to do that. Worldwide credit card networks routinely execute more than a million transactions per second in peak times, and Bitcoin can barely manage a million per day, even with billions of dollars in hardware doing it. Bitcoin was designed intentionally to be slow and expensive (proof-of-work model), so this is not a matter of technology making it better "someday", but rather Bitcoin will always be this way. Today, Bitcoin is actually slower and more expensive to transact than it used to be, so it has actually gotten worse.

You can tout Bitcoin's advantages all you like, but it simply impossible for Bitcoin to become the way that ordinary people pay for things in their day to day lives. It hasn't happened despite 15 years and billions of dollars of trying, and it's won't happen, ever.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Bitcoin was designed intentionally to be slow and expensive (proof-of-work model), so this is not a matter of technology making it better "someday"

This is not entirely true. It is possible to implement batch payments on a second layer, and convert one UTXO into many off-chain payments, without the downsides of the lightning network. That's what the Ark team has started implementing since last year. If this works out, it could handle many millions of transactions per day.

Today, Bitcoin is actually slower and more expensive to transact than it used to be, so it has actually gotten worse.

Pardon? How is it slower and more expensive? It always confirms transactions every 10 minutes. It also got cheaper to move around (with the 0.1 sat/vb relay fee update).

I'm starting to think you don't know what "final settlement" means or you think it doesn't have any use cases. I'm also starting to think you don't know entirely how Bitcoin works.

[cryptosize]

Bitcoin was designed intentionally to be slow and expensive (proof-of-work model), so this is not a matter of technology making it better "someday"

This is not entirely true. It is possible to implement batch payments on a second layer, and convert one UTXO into many off-chain payments, without the downsides of the lightning network. That's what the Ark team has started implementing since last year. If this works out, it could handle many millions of transactions per day.

Just like RFC 1918.

"Oh noez, IPv4 is not adequate to provide internet access to everyone!"

"IPv6 will surely replace IPv4 soon enough, who the hell likes small 32-bit addresses?"

Funny how there are so many IT guys on this forum (even from the 80s BBS era) and yet, they fail to recognize similar tech patterns.

Today, Bitcoin is actually slower and more expensive to transact than it used to be, so it has actually gotten worse.

Pardon? How is it slower and more expensive? It always confirms transactions every 10 minutes. It also got cheaper to move around (with the 0.1 sat/vb relay fee update).

I'm starting to think you don't know what "final settlement" means or you think it doesn't have any use cases. I'm also starting to think you don't know entirely how Bitcoin works.

Most shitcoiners don't know jackshit and you know it.

[legiteum]

This is not entirely true. It is possible to implement batch payments on a second layer, and convert one UTXO into many off-chain payments, without the downsides of the lightning network. That's what the Ark team has started implementing since last year. If this works out, it could handle many millions of transactions per day.

Ah yes, the old, "L2" argument for Bitcoin: "if we just add a layer to Bitcoin that is not Bitcoin then "Bitcoin" will work just great". This is an admission of defeat if there ever was one.

If you store your value on an L2, you are 100% dependent on the L2. Every single advantage you think Bitcoin would bring is nullified with an L2, because the software the user is actually touching is not Bitcoin, it's the L2. And all of the L2s out there don't use an architecture anything like Bitcoin because... Bitcoin's architecture doesn't scale.

Calling an L2 on top of Bitcoin, "Bitcoin", is no different than calling a Bitcoin ETF, "Bitcoin".

[d5000]

How strong is that anyways? How many merchants have adopted Bitcoin only for that and would jump to the next thing if it had even lower fees than Bitcoin?

The merchant-driven adoption idea came mostly from an observation I made in the last few years, that some online businesses I regularly use added Bitcoin (and crypto in general) to their payment options, after a long stagnation in that area in the late 2010s (it's a post-pandemic phenomenon). Most of them used a payment processor but not all. These businesses were not Bitcoin-related but mostly in the computing field (e.g. domains, hosting etc.). Why would they have added the Bitcoin option? I guess the reason could indeed have to do with fees. In my country for example some businesses will charge a fee for credit card payments because they're more expensive for them. This has reduced credit card and QR payment (which also comes with fees) usage in my observation in detriment of bank transfers (which is preferred by the shops), but entering bank transfer details of course is a bit clunky.

A low-volatility Bitcoin, where you can pay by QR too but doesn't charge fees (apart from tx fees), does have a potential to be a real competitor, as it combines the usability of credit cards and the low fees of a bank transfer, plus as I mentioned the potential to use the funds simply as treasury/investment.

Just today I stumbled upon this recent PayPal study about crypto usage by merchants in the US, while they do not mention fees, they mention transaction speed as the top factor, and I guess they're referring to the "clearing" and "chargeback" problem (transaction finality is much faster with Bitcoin/crypto than with credit cards).

These are the main reasons for crypto adoption:

Merchants cite several advantages to accepting crypto, led by:

    Faster transaction speed (45%)
    Access to and attraction of new customers (45%)
    Enhanced security features (41%)
    Greater privacy for customers (40%)

PayPal may not be 100% impartial here, as they have adopted crypto and they could present this study as a justification, but it matches my own observations of increased adoption by e-commerce.

Well as I have put it, they could already do this with a low-risk approach. For this kind of thing even volatility does not matter so much, as long as it does not pose an existential problem as we have presented such a case here.

I doubt that, I guess most merchants are still scared about volatility and that for me is the reason why most still use payment processors. It may actually the reason why "low fees" was not mentioned in the PayPal study.

Why would you, as a sane merchant who is not addicted to consuming content and information like most people (utopian scenario) care about the volatility of Bitcoin in the short term? What is actually the goal of the merchant supposed to be? Build a long-term balance in Bitcoin? Achieve better short term gains as BTC could have better returns than USD? Something else? A lot of it is going to depend on this. For me the most sane goal would be to slowly stack an amount that poses zero risk at all even if it is completely lost.

I agree here and with most of the remaining of your post but I guess most merchants do still not think that much about the "stacking up" / "treasury" option. I think lower downside volatility would greatly help for this to become more popular.

BTW:

You are answering the user as if he had actually read anything at all here.

After several pages I'm often inclined to "reforce" some of the arguments of the OP, as it's more likely that people react on the last pages' posts. I've observed that in many forums, not only at Bitcointalk. Of course this user seems to simply have been lazy but often for me it's still better to react if there are several similar posts in a row, otherwise other lazy posters will see it as an invitation to spam another similar answer and the thread's quality will go downhill (what many of these people want is to convert it in a spam megathread where their own low quality reply will not be noticed anymore).

[BlackHatCoiner]

Calling an L2 on top of Bitcoin, "Bitcoin", is no different than calling a Bitcoin ETF, "Bitcoin".

Okay, now I'm convinced you don't know how Bitcoin works at all!

It's surprising seeing this level of incompetence from people with a technical background. A bitcoin in the lightning network is the same bitcoin as the Bitcoin network. The only difference is that you need to constantly stay online to detect cheating, and broadcast a penalty transaction on time. Besides that requirement it is exactly the same as a bitcoin on-chain in your wallet.

Study Bitcoin!

[legiteum]

Calling an L2 on top of Bitcoin, "Bitcoin", is no different than calling a Bitcoin ETF, "Bitcoin".

Okay, now I'm convinced you don't know how Bitcoin works at all!

It's surprising seeing this level of incompetence from people with a technical background. A bitcoin in the lightning network is the same bitcoin as the Bitcoin network. The only difference is that you need to constantly stay online to detect cheating, and broadcast a penalty transaction on time. Besides that requirement it is exactly the same as a bitcoin on-chain in your wallet.

Study Bitcoin!

LOL, personal attacks. That's what you have to resort to, huh?

When a user interacts with Lightning, they interact with Lightning, which means any disadvantage Lightning may have (or absence of advantage) is necessarily part of the user experience. What Lightning does after your interaction with it doesn't negate what it does itself.

Now, one can obviously wait for the L2 to execute the real, on-chain Bitcoin transaction in order to make sure the L2 did not fool you, but that negates the value of the L2 since you must wait for the actual Bitcoin network to execute the transaction. In other words, if you need to verify the L2 did its job, then why use the L2 at all?

Maybe that's why Bitcoin L2s have never amounted to anything in the marketplace: they are a pointless waste of time and resources...

Just today I stumbled upon this recent PayPal study about crypto usage by merchants in the US, while they do not mention fees, they mention transaction speed as the top factor, and I guess they're referring to the "clearing" and "chargeback" problem (transaction finality is much faster with Bitcoin/crypto than with credit cards).

Bitcoin has faster settlement time than credit cards and payment apps, but it's still thousands of times slower than many other cryptos and stablecoins.

And this poll is basically asking merchants, "wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to wait for final payment settlement and didn't have to deal with chargebacks?" The answer would be, "of course", but that question is out of context.

The full question would need to be:

"Would you, Mr. Merchant, adopt a payment method that had immediate settlement time and no in-network chargebacks, in exchange for making your users wait 20 minutes for the transactions to go through, and where transactions would cost many times what credit cards cost?"

Ask the question that way, and you'll get a different answer.

That PayPal poll is a case for fast stablecoins, not Bitcoin. Merchants want faster response time for their users (faster transactions = more revenues), instant settlement, and lower (not higher) transaction fees. And they don't want to (or, here in 2026, need to) make any unpleasant trade-offs.

(Do you ever get the impression that Bitcoin is destined to be the MySpace of digital currencies? )

[BlackHatCoiner]

When a user interacts with Lightning, they interact with Lightning, which means any disadvantage Lightning may have (or absence of advantage) is necessarily part of the user experience.

... yes? Your point being?

Now, one can obviously wait for the L2 to execute the real, on-chain Bitcoin transaction in order to make sure the L2 did not fool you, but that negates the value of the L2 since you must wait for the actual Bitcoin network to execute the transaction.

Did you prompt my reply to ChatGPT and it hallucinated or something? The value of the Layer 2 is that it allows you to execute many transactions off-chain for near zero cost. After a channel is created absolutely no interaction with the Bitcoin network is required to move funds around off-chain. That's why it's called "off-chain".

[legiteum]

When a user interacts with Lightning, they interact with Lightning, which means any disadvantage Lightning may have (or absence of advantage) is necessarily part of the user experience.

... yes? Your point being?

That Lightning is not Bitcoin.

The value of the Layer 2 is that it allows you to execute many transactions off-chain for near zero cost. After a channel is created absolutely no interaction with the Bitcoin network is required to move funds around off-chain. That's why it's called "off-chain".

Right. OFF CHAIN. If it's not on the Bitcoin blockchain, it's not Bitcoin. If it's not Bitcoin, you don't get to pretend that Bitcoin has all of the advantages that the L2 has.

Maybe that's why L2s have never taken off in the mainstream: because they don't solve any real problems. Maybe that's why almost no merchants take Bitcoin on the Internet (<.1% of merchants that take credit cards). Maybe that's what there's almost no interest in Lightning even after 15 years of trying.

The only reason this zombie idea still persists is that people actually don't understand how Bitcoin works and thus don't understand the proof-of-work architecture and its implications, e.g. that Bitcoin is slow and expensive, and will always be slow and expensive since it was designed to be slow and expensive.

Most people imagine Bitcoin is just going to magically get better since all technologies in the past worked that way, so the lie about L2s is an easy lie to tell. But the market doesn't lie: near-zero adoption of L2s, near-zero adoption of Bitcoin as a mainstream payment method, gigantic and rapidly growing adoption of stablecoins.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Right. OFF CHAIN. If it's not on the Bitcoin blockchain, it's not Bitcoin. If it's not Bitcoin, you don't get to pretend that Bitcoin has all of the advantages that the L2 has.

It literally is. If you try to cheat the lightning spreadsheet, I can broadcast a penalty transaction and get all your bitcoin on-chain. It literally inherits the security of the Layer 1. Any amount of bitcoin you send me to my lightning invoices, I can convert them to real bitcoin any time I want, without having to ask for anyone's permission. That's literally bitcoin.

You just have a poor technical understanding and it shows.

[legiteum]

Right. OFF CHAIN. If it's not on the Bitcoin blockchain, it's not Bitcoin. If it's not Bitcoin, you don't get to pretend that Bitcoin has all of the advantages that the L2 has.

It literally is. If you try to cheat the lightning spreadsheet, I can broadcast a penalty transaction and get all your bitcoin on-chain. It literally inherits the security of the Layer 1. Any amount of bitcoin you send me to my lightning invoices, I can convert them to real bitcoin any time I want, without having to ask for anyone's permission. That's literally bitcoin.

You just have a poor technical understanding and it shows.

So you're saying that Lightning transactions aren't immutable, like Bitcoin transactions are? Interesting. Yep, exactly like Bitcoin alright  .

Also, does Bitcoin inherit all of Lightning's bugs and security vulnerabilities? Sounds like it, since you keep saying that Lightning is the same as Bitcoin:

https://protos.com/it-took-a-decade-to-fix-this-bitcoin-lightning-bug/

https://medium.com/@RocketMeUpCybersecurity/lightning-network-security-mitigating-risks-in-off-chain-transactions-63118079eb29

(And there are many many more...).

Lightning isn't Bitcoin. If it were, then they would just make Lightning, Bitcoin and forget about Bitcoin core altogether.

And if Lightning actually had a real-world use, then it would be widely adopted.

All L2's amount to the same thing: a different architecture and network that eventually (at the whim of the L2) transacts on the actual Bitcoin network. Hence it is not honest to combine the benefits of both Lightning and Bitcoin anymore than it's honest to combine the benefits of the Bitcoin ETF and Bitcoin.

This is why Bitcoin is not accepted by hardly any mainstream merchants.

This is why nobody here pays for their morning coffee with Bitcoin (or Lightning for that matter).

This is why this is never going to happen, ever.

This is why fast stablecoins are growing in merchant acceptance and Bitcoin is not.

This is why many posters here (even some that swear that Bitcoin is useful for absolutely anything and everything else is terrible) themselves use stablecoins "for certain things" for... some strange reason .

[Ambatman]

Calling an L2 on top of Bitcoin, "Bitcoin", is no different than calling a Bitcoin ETF, "Bitcoin".

Hopefully this comes out as intended
Funds in LN are Bitcoin UTXOs locked in multisig
No new coins are created.

Reminds me what Satofan said about trolls
Now we going a little off topic.

I doubt that, I guess most merchants are still scared about volatility and that for me is the reason why most still use payment processors. It may actually the reason why "low fees" was not mentioned in the PayPal study.

Speaking about volatility
Even earliest form of money had it
During the barter system for example though not perfect (nothing ever is)
They still had some level of volatility.
The value of a fur in summer can't be the same in winter.
Gold and silver faced volatility in ancient times when rulers try to play smart to create more by adding metals to their coins
Reminds me alot about issues Leverages and Paper Bitcoins are having on Bitcoin volatility.

[legiteum]

Calling an L2 on top of Bitcoin, "Bitcoin", is no different than calling a Bitcoin ETF, "Bitcoin".

Hopefully this comes out as intended
Funds in LN are Bitcoin UTXOs locked in multisig
No new coins are created.

No new coins are created when you buy shares of a Bitcoin ETF as well. I'm not sure why that's relevant.

I hate to drag things off-topic as well, but the OP made the acceptance of Bitcoin on the mainstream retail level a key part of his argument, and Bitcoin cannot possibly scale to handle any such thing, and there's absolutely no debating that.

The only "argument" in favor of "Bitcoin scaling" is to do a little bait-and-switch where you claim that this other thing supposedly scales, and that other thing is somehow also Bitcoin.

So relevant to the OP:

• Bitcoin will never scale to anything even remotely approaching mainstream transaction volume.
• Merchants want some of the advantages of Bitcoin, which is instant settlement and the lack of chargebacks, but it is clearly not worth making their users wait for several minutes for a transaction to complete, or transactions costing many times that of credit cards.
• Therefore, mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin as a payment method hasn't happened even after 15 years and billions of dollars being poured into to the problem, and isn't going to happen ever.
• Therefore, volatility is a feature for Bitcoin, not a bug, since Bitcoin is only useful as a speculative asset, not something that has any real-world utility.

But in the spirit of agreeing to disagree, suffice it to say that if you believe mainstream transactions (viz. your morning coffee) will be paid for with Bitcoin soon, then you can make the case that Bitcoin's future is utility, and thus volatility is a bug in that context.

[barbara44]

It worked out amazing for the marketing of it and I agree that its the number one reason why its so famous. At the early days of bitcoin and crypto, making 20-30% even 100% was a simple thing and happened quite often, it was not a big deal.

Let me put it this way, when it went from 150 dollars to 1000+ dollars we were not really that shocked, we were much less in numbers and we hoped it would happen before it did so we were happy, whereas today it would be crazy to see it go up that much, like to 700k for example, that's insane to think, not that it can't happen, but would take a decade or more, whereas back in the day it would take less than a year.

[OgNasty]

Volatility is a great thing.  It keeps people from using leverage to make huge gains or just buying Saylor style and getting rich on autopilot.  Maybe that isn't what people want, but personally I like it.  It separates the people who are here just to suck liquidity from the market and people who believe in Bitcoin.  The people who want to suck out liquidity buy the tops on leverage, then become the liquidity when the market turns.  This is an important feature to me that ultimately limits crashes by constantly resetting market leverage, and it also punishes the people who look to suck money out of the Bitcoin market while rewarding those who act responsibly and stick with their long term stacking goals.

[henry_of_skalitz]

It worked out amazing for the marketing of it and I agree that its the number one reason why its so famous. At the early days of bitcoin and crypto, making 20-30% even 100% was a simple thing and happened quite often, it was not a big deal.

Let me put it this way, when it went from 150 dollars to 1000+ dollars we were not really that shocked, we were much less in numbers and we hoped it would happen before it did so we were happy, whereas today it would be crazy to see it go up that much, like to 700k for example, that's insane to think, not that it can't happen, but would take a decade or more, whereas back in the day it would take less than a year.

In the retrospective, volatility will be seen as the thing that pushed the boundaries and allowed some to see such X'es that they probably won't see in their lifetime..

The smaller the cap was - the easier it was to move around. Now it's not like that because we have big numbers to push.

[Satofan44]

How strong is that anyways? How many merchants have adopted Bitcoin only for that and would jump to the next thing if it had even lower fees than Bitcoin?

The merchant-driven adoption idea came mostly from an observation I made in the last few years, that some online businesses I regularly use added Bitcoin (and crypto in general) to their payment options, after a long stagnation in that area in the late 2010s (it's a post-pandemic phenomenon). Most of them used a payment processor but not all. These businesses were not Bitcoin-related but mostly in the computing field (e.g. domains, hosting etc.). Why would they have added the Bitcoin option? I guess the reason could indeed have to do with fees. In my country for example some businesses will charge a fee for credit card payments because they're more expensive for them. This has reduced credit card and QR payment (which also comes with fees) usage in my observation in detriment of bank transfers (which is preferred by the shops), but entering bank transfer details of course is a bit clunky.

How many of those merchants have adopted Bitcoin directly through a solution where Bitcoin goes directly to their wallets and how many used a payment processor for whatever reason? I believe that many did the latter and the savings were less than one would expect since all these intermediaries always add unnecessarily high fees into the process.

A low-volatility Bitcoin, where you can pay by QR too but doesn't charge fees (apart from tx fees), does have a potential to be a real competitor, as it combines the usability of credit cards and the low fees of a bank transfer, plus as I mentioned the potential to use the funds simply as treasury/investment.

My point is that if they are only adopting it for fees, then Bitcoin can never be the top competitor in this field. It merely introduced competition into a very stagnant area, but centralized blockchains or tokens are going to have much lower fees. It is not possible to compete in that area with something that needs an expensive server to run due to the amount of resource requirements that it has. Wouldn't you agree with this?

Just today I stumbled upon this recent PayPal study about crypto usage by merchants in the US, while they do not mention fees, they mention transaction speed as the top factor, and I guess they're referring to the "clearing" and "chargeback" problem (transaction finality is much faster with Bitcoin/crypto than with credit cards).

These are the main reasons for crypto adoption:

Merchants cite several advantages to accepting crypto, led by:

    Faster transaction speed (45%)
    Access to and attraction of new customers (45%)
    Enhanced security features (41%)
    Greater privacy for customers (40%)

PayPal may not be 100% impartial here, as they have adopted crypto and they could present this study as a justification, but it matches my own observations of increased adoption by e-commerce.

Interesting, but where is your fees thesis here then?  

Well as I have put it, they could already do this with a low-risk approach. For this kind of thing even volatility does not matter so much, as long as it does not pose an existential problem as we have presented such a case here.

I doubt that, I guess most merchants are still scared about volatility and that for me is the reason why most still use payment processors. It may actually the reason why "low fees" was not mentioned in the PayPal study.

I am again saying, everything depends on the reason why a merchant is adopting Bitcoin in your scenario.

Why would you, as a sane merchant who is not addicted to consuming content and information like most people (utopian scenario) care about the volatility of Bitcoin in the short term? What is actually the goal of the merchant supposed to be? Build a long-term balance in Bitcoin? Achieve better short term gains as BTC could have better returns than USD? Something else? A lot of it is going to depend on this. For me the most sane goal would be to slowly stack an amount that poses zero risk at all even if it is completely lost.

I agree here and with most of the remaining of your post but I guess most merchants do still not think that much about the "stacking up" / "treasury" option. I think lower downside volatility would greatly help for this to become more popular.

Yeah but you are not explicitly answering my question, I can read the answer only implicitly. If you group the two big categories then, we'd have the treasury option and the fees option. As I have said, in terms of the treasury option the volatility does not matter so much already. In terms of the fees-only option, I do not see how Bitcoin can win against centralized solutions even if the situation with the volatility was significantly improved. That is my central "rebuttal thesis". For the sake of what you are talking about, it does matter, but in the grand scheme of things it does not because we can not win for merchants that only care about the fees or speed.

BTW:

You are answering the user as if he had actually read anything at all here.

After several pages I'm often inclined to "reforce" some of the arguments of the OP, as it's more likely that people react on the last pages' posts. I've observed that in many forums, not only at Bitcointalk. Of course this user seems to simply have been lazy but often for me it's still better to react if there are several similar posts in a row, otherwise other lazy posters will see it as an invitation to spam another similar answer and the thread's quality will go downhill (what many of these people want is to convert it in a spam megathread where their own low quality reply will not be noticed anymore).

I'd expect or demand from people to at least read your first post fully, everything else is spam. Writing generic responses about volatility without actually addressing the question that is posed in the thread is a sign of a spamming user.