[mrb]

Who do you think is more guilty of playing with figures: the one who looks at temporary peaks and dips, or the one who looks at quarterly averages to find the overall macro trend? ;)

I once compiled datapoints showing the growth of BitPay (ie. customers spending bitcoins on real goods and services from real merchants). You will find it interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7974197

[sanswork]

One who uses short term spikes to make their long term data look better? We can(and have) gone back and forth on this a bunch.

That reply is actually to me in a previous discussion. As I said before Bitpay has known to do the exact same thing(use short term spikes) and attribute it to daily volume. They did it during the last holiday season along with Coinbase then both ended up deleting all the blog posts when called out on their figures not matching up.

So until I see a long term trend from them that is >$1m/day or I see merchants coming forward and saying they are seeing increased sales I'm going to take that figure with a grain of salt.

As for the rest. Half your stats there are increased employee and office count which come from them raising money.

The other half is an increase in merchant adoption which makes sense. Everything about bitcoins in legitimate transactions is beneficial to merchants by putting all the risk and fees on the consumer side.

[mrb]

"One who uses short term spikes"

Exactly. And you are doing it. You look at the weekly average (short term), while I look at the quarterly average (long term). Please understand that taking the average on longer periods of time will hide/smooth out short time spikes in a way that is statistical and purely objective (unlike your subjective interpretation of short term spikes).

In fact, the peak of number of transactions you said happened around March-April 2013 was precisely due to one of these short term spikes: a bubble where BTC went from ~$15 on January 1, 2013 to ~$260 on April 10, 2013: http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg730zczsg2012-1... (people were all buying/selling/trading BTC like crazy).

You are inferring too much from BitPay's post deletion. For all we know their numbers in the immediate 2-3 months following Bitcoin Black Friday 2013 were down (Black Friday sales were great, hard to sustain). Maybe they felt a bit disappointed by them, so they took them down. So what? Their overall growth is indisputable: "BitPay processed $5k/day in May 2012, $18k/day in Sep 2012, $160k/day in March 2013, $300k/day average through 2013, and now $1.0M/day." It does not matter if they are doing $500k/day or $1M/day or $2M/day. Growth is here, which is why they got bit VC funding.

[sanswork]

If you want to get an objective value shouldn't you remove the outliers from the data?

>So what?

So what is not that they took them down because sales slumped they took them down because they were using them to justify the types of numbers that you quote immediately following that.

>BitPay processed $5k/day in May 2012, $18k/day in Sep 2012, $160k/day in March 2013, $300k/day average through 2013, and now $1.0M/day.

These numbers. It's easy for them to pick and choose spikes in the data and report that.

> It does not matter if they are doing $500k/day or $1M/day or $2M/day

Then why do you keep going on about them doing $1m/day if you're not convinced yourself?

>Growth is here, which is why they got bit VC funding.

Definitely. In merchant adoption. VC funding could just as easily be a speculative bet that that merchant adoption will eventually convert to sales not that it already has. Beenz and Flooz got VC as well remember(the first one almost as much as all bitcoin vc so far).

Anyhow. We're circling around around to the same points and using the data to suit our own needs and arguing over a figure that doesn't really mean anything(number of transactions) since it can easily be inflated and because we can both use it to show our own views. At least we're not discussing my wallet accounts or coinbase accounts.

I'll ask again. Do you know many merchants who are seeing strong and consistent sales in bitcoins? What are they? Do they specialize in bitcoin related products?

[mrb]

The growth can be seen even if you remove outlier months (especially the bubble months Mar-May 2013.)

Even if you assume BitPay is lying by reporting peak days, it would still likely imply growth: higher peaks likely correlate with higher average volume.

When I say it does not matter whether today they are at 500k or 1M or 2M, I mean it does not matter because they were at 160k in March 2013, so any number above that demonstrates a growth.

CheapAir.com and Overstock recently said they see consistent sales: http://www.coindesk.com/cheapair-tops-1-5-million-in-total-b... Also Amagi Metals has always reported very consistent and growing Bitcoin sales. These are a few that come to mind right now.

[sanswork]

CheapAir.com is releasing their first figures so there is no way to say if they are consistent growing or shrinking other than him saying expedia hasn't lead to shrinking sales.

Overstock has definitely not said they have seen consistent sales. Their sales have been shrinking since they started.

Jan 10 - 130K[1]

Jan 11-29 - $26K/day average [1] (600,000-130,000)/18

Next 36 days to March 4th they do $400K [2] - $11K/day average

Next 83 days to May 27th they do $600K [3] - $7200/day average

-----

[1] http://onbitcoin.com/2014/01/31/bitcoin-executives-testify-i...

[2] http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-million-bitcoin-sales-futu...

[3] http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-ceo-patrick-byrne-1-6m-bit...

Amagi Metals reported very strong growth up last year. Literally reporting every milestone they hit($50K, $175k, $220k, $750k) then in April of last year they just stopped. Then a year later after someone else reports selling $10m worth of stuff they suddenly appear again saying "Oh ya we passed $10m already".

Please keep coming up with them though. It would be good to see some winners. The only one I've seen so far is a bar in Florida that hosts weekly bitcoin meetups.

[mrb]

For Overstock you are looking at a very short time period (5 months). Similarly, Google's revenue declined over a 6-month period from $16.9B in 2013Q4 to $15.4B in 2014Q1, so by your logic Google's revenue is shrinking too(!)

In reality sales are highly cyclical: you need to look at least at the year level to measure a trend. This is why I keep pointing you to payment processors BitPay and Coinbase, as they have existed for at least 1.5 years (and they publish numbers despite being private companies). Now that the first public companies are starting to accept Bitcoin (Expedia, Dell, Dish Network, Overstock), it is going to give us more data on Bitcoin's growth as they release public financial reports.