[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

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[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.

[sanswork]

You say Overstock says they see consistent sales and I show you that their sales have been shrinking from day 1 and your response is "Well duh there isn't enough data!". Seriously?

Besides that you're comparing 2 quarters out of many with 2 quarters that are all the data we have. If those 2 quarters were their most recent then yes we could say their revenue is shrinking.

You keep pointing me to self reporting figures randomly released in press releases by companies that have been dishonest with them in the past. You keep doing that not because it makes sense but because it supports your beliefs.

Heres one for you. 5 years in there are only ~600,000 wallets with at least $50 worth of coin. Given how many people split up their coins between multiple wallets how many actual users do you think that leaves?

Anyhow I'm done with this discussion. It is clear nothing will convince you and you'd rather drag goal posts around a field than face the fact that maybe just maybe customer adoption isn't happening in Bitcoin. Good luck with your investment I hope it makes you rich because the alternative is going to be a lot of people in serious financial troubles.

[mrb]

Correct, I should not have given you the Overstock example, since there is not enough data for them.

"yes we could say [Google's] revenue is shrinking"

Here lies your lack of knowledge. No analyst ever said Google's revenues were shrinking when their 2014Q1 results were announced. Instead analysts said they "grew revenues 19 percent year over year." See http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/16/5621450/google-q1-2014-ear... . This is because, as I explained, it makes no sense to compare one quarter with the previous one as this is only 6 months of data and as sales are cyclical (typically a yearly cycle). So analysts compare a quarter with the same quarter from the previous year to cover a span of 15 months (a full yearly cycle).

"how many actual users do you think that leaves"

You make a common mistake: assuming that each user has at least 1 address. In fact, a LOT of users leave their coins on exchanges who tend to consolidate coins in a small number of Bitcoin addresses. Therefore you cannot estimate the number of users from the number of addresses with a non-zero balance.