[sanswork]

>Are you denying all these metrics as a whole

I'm denying the ones I've commented on are important.

>implying that Bitcoin's usage is either stagnating or declining

I think it is but thats not what I'm implying. I'm implying that people heavily invested in bitcoin tend to use vanity metrics like this.

That said the things I look at that make me believe bitcoin is stagnating/declining are things like the continued slide of the price over the year, Bitcoin Black Friday 2014 being a huge failure, Overstock missing their bitcoin sales expectations by 17 million dollars. Basically every vendor I've seen comment on sales has said there have been pretty much none this year. The fact that 2014 was meant to be the year of bitcoin and there has been no breakout in the general public. Everyone seems vaguely aware of bitcoin but no one is investing any time in learning anything about it because it solves problems that most people don't care about(freedom) and creates problems they do(security).

Now I just see people in the community rallying around remittance and the killer app that will save bitcoin but the actual transfer of funds isn't the expensive part of remittance the compliance around the transfer of funds is and the existing services that do remittance cheaper using bitcoin only work now because they are ignoring compliance completely. They will either get more expensive or be shut down in the near future.

[timeal]

> Bitcoin Black Friday 2014 being a huge failure

No, BBF 2014 was a huge success: "we saw an 82% increase in the number of merchants who completed transactions compared to last year’s BBF", "Both Gyft and NewEgg experienced their best day of bitcoin sales ever" - http://blog.bitpay.com/2014/12/09/bitcoin-black-friday-2014-...

> every vendor I've seen comment on sales has said there have been pretty much none this year

You are wrong, which is why you quote no source. 2014 was the best year ever for bitcoin sales. See the BBF numbers above. CheapAir recently passed $1.5 million in bitcoin sales (http://www.coindesk.com/cheapair-litecoin-dogecoin-flights/). Newegg, although they quote no numbers, was sufficiently pleased with their Bitcoin sales that they decided to accept them in Canada in August. Same thing for Overstock who decided to expand bitcoin acceptance to their international market.

> Bitcoin solves problems that most people don't care about(freedom) and creates problems they do(security).

Bitcoin solves a lot more than that. You must not be very familiar with it. I will give you 2 basic examples. The most important problem that Bitcoin solves is fraud: a merchant who receives a payment in bitcoins can be assured it won't be "charged back" or "cancelled" due to fraud, because Bitcoin payements are cryptographically irreversible. So once a merchant receives a payment in Bitcoin, the product or service can be shipped or executed ASAP with no risk of fraud. And conversely, Bitcoin solves the problem of financial theft for customers: if Joe Schmo decides to pay a trusted merchant like Dell in bitcoins (as opposed to using a credit card) he can be assured that if Dell is hit by hackers who steal CC data, they won't be able to financially steal from Joe, because the payment he made in bitcoins authorized cryptographically a certain amount of coins to be transferred, nothing more. Whereas if Joe had given his credit card information to Dell, hackers would have been able to initiate any number of other transactions.

Now, I do recognize that Bitcoin is not automatically easy and secure to use. But there are plenty of smart people working to make this happen: cryptographic 2-party escrow to deal with untrusted merchants (which is superior to 3-way escrows used by the traditional financial system: removing the third-party escrow simplifies the trust model), hardware wallets to deal with wallet security, etc.

> the actual transfer of funds isn't the expensive part of remittance the compliance around the transfer of funds is

That's false. Compliance in the financial industry is mostly automated: it is just software checks like who sends what to who, and data logging/retaining records. The most expensive part of the business is the requirement to have physical presence --offices and employees-- to deal with the need to be able to handle cash deposits and withdrawals. Bitcoin services make this cheaper because they don't need physical presence. https://www.sendbitcoin.mx for example accepts deposit by sending coins to their service, and they rely on the ATM network of an established bank for withdrawals. They are cheaper than Western Union for the same reason why simple.com is cheaper than traditional banks: they don't have physical presence.

[sanswork]

>No, BBF 2014 was a huge success

Notice they changed the metric from the number of sales to the number of merchants? Because it was a huge flop.

>"Both Gyft and NewEgg experienced their best day of bitcoin sales ever"

Congrats to those two companies. That doesn't change the fact that the event was a flop.

>You are wrong, which is why you quote no source.

I quote no source because I'm too lazy to go search through the /r/bitcoin posts. Go search for accepting/started/etc then contact the merchants and see what they say. Better yet search for "no sales" or similar, search for complaints about coinmap they generally revolve around a store not receiving any sales, getting rid of bitcoin and having the user be stuck. Or look at Adafruit.

>CheapAir recently passed $1.5 million in bitcoin sales

It's been over a year since they started taking bitcoin we have no indication if they are seeing growth or shrinkage in sales with just one figure.

>Newegg, although they quote no numbers

Enough said.

>Same thing for Overstock who decided to expand bitcoin acceptance to their international market.

This being the same Overstock that recently announced they missed their bitcoin target by $17 million dollars? Overstock is helpful in that they release their figures regularly so you can plot the decline in sales on a chart easily.

>The most important problem that Bitcoin solves is fraud

It solves fraud for merchants by removing consumer protections. Merchants having no fraud doesn't matter if no one uses it because they don't want to get screwed over by merchants. (Look at all the complaints related to Tigerdirect and bitcoin orders).

>And conversely, Bitcoin solves the problem of financial theft for customers: if Joe Schmo decides to pay a trusted merchant like Dell in bitcoins

Note the trusted part? What about all the millions of other merchants online? Or do you expect everyone to centralize into a few trusted retailers? Besides that there are plenty of trusted merchants who make mistakes sometimes that require charge backs. With bitcoin you're out of luck.

>he can be assured that if Dell is hit by hackers who steal CC data, they won't be able to financially steal from Joe

If they steal his CC data he can be sure they won't be able to financially steal from him either since he is insured against loss by his credit card company.

Unfortunately for Joe he isn't a security expert and his odds of losing money due to accidentally installing a coin stealing virus are way higher than the odds of him losing money due to Visa not accepting his fraud claim.

>cryptographic 2-party escrow to deal with untrusted merchants

A new one appears every few months at which point I post the reason they don't work and the developer moves on.

>The most expensive part of the business is the requirement to have physical presence --offices and employees-- to deal with the need to be able to handle cash deposits and withdrawals

That is another very expensive part of it. It's required because you're often dealing with the unbanked who can't just have an exchange deposit money in their account. Again bitcoin doesn't solve this problem.

>Bitcoin services make this cheaper because they don't need physical presence. https://www.sendbitcoin.mx for example accepts deposit by sending coins to their service, and they rely on the ATM network of an established bank for withdrawals.

They do actually need a physical presence to compete with the services that have a physical presence. There are a lot of people who can't receive a bank transfer.

Sendbitcoin.mx will not be around for long once the bank they utilize finds out they are using their service for remittance because they are avoiding all regulations which make remittance to MX expensive. If it was so easy to do remittance using the ATMs surely the bank that owns the network would be doing it by themselves and raking in the money.

[timeal]

> Notice they changed the metric from the number of sales to the number of merchants? Because it was a huge flop.

Most likely they quoted this number because 10 or 20 or 30% "increased sales" sounded less impressive. It doesn't really matter. The reality is that there are 82% more merchants who completed sales than last year, so no it was not a huge flop. By the way you still fail at providing any data why it was a "huge flop". Second time I have called you on this, and second time you ignore me. Burying your head in the sand saying something does not make that thing a reality.

> I quote no source because I'm too lazy

You quote no source because you have no source.

I am confident you are able to find some anecdotes on /r/bitcoin from a few mom-and-pop shops disappointed by their bitcoin sales this year. But anecdotes are not data. Data is the "+82%" number I reported above.

> This being the same Overstock that recently announced they missed their bitcoin target by $17 million dollars? Overstock is helpful in that they release their figures regularly so you can plot the decline in sales on a chart easily.

Their sales are not declining anymore. They have reached a steady state of $7000-8000 a day for the last 3 months: http://www.coindesk.com/overstocks-2014-bitcoin-sales-miss-p... But I am sure you will ignore this piece of so called "data" and continue shouting around that "overstock sales are declining!!!!1!!one"

> Merchants having no fraud doesn't matter if no one uses it

"if no one uses it" -> that's the thing, people actually use Bitcoin, and pay with it: Newegg, CheapAir, Overstock, etc. So it really does matter to such merchants that Bitcoin removes the risk of fraud.

> Note the trusted part?

That's precisely my point: most sales are performed with trusted merchants. It is OK for a payment system to not provide the consumer protections of credit cards. That's why cash works. You go to a restaurant and pay cash because you don't care about giving up the ability to contest the charge: you trust the restaurant. For the same reason, when I go to a local restaurant accepting bitcoins, I have no qualms paying in bitcoins. There are SOME transactions for which Bitcoin does not work well out of the box, like paying an untrusted online merchant without escrow, but that's OK. Bitcoin doesn't have to satisfy 100% of use cases to be successful. You seem to see Bitcoin as binary: it has to be perfect or it can't work at all. But you are wrong. It is just like cash or credit cards: they don't work in 100% of use cases either (can't send cash online, my CC can't be used when I encounter the 3rd merchant of the day who only takes Visa/Mastercard but not my Amex), yet they are successful payment systems.

> Besides that there are plenty of trusted merchants who make mistakes sometimes that require charge backs. With bitcoin you're out of luck.

I chuckled at this. Obviously you are unfamiliar with how it's done. The standard way of doing a "charge back" in Bitcoin is to ask the customer to provide a refund address. Easy peasy :)

> If they steal his CC data he can be sure they won't be able to financially steal from him either since he is insured against loss by his credit card company.

You completely ignored what I said: despite not losing money, it can be a tremendous annoyance and hassle to cancel and replace a CC, with the incident affecting your credit score, etc. These are real problems, real annoyances, NOT solved by credit cards. Bitcoin fixes that.

> Unfortunately for Joe he isn't a security expert and his odds of losing money due to accidentally installing a coin stealing virus are way higher than the odds of him losing money due to Visa not accepting his fraud claim.

Second time you completely ignored what I said: yes security is hard, but hardware wallets are improving security. You can't deny this.

> A new one appears every few months at which point I post the reason they don't work and the developer moves on.

They do work (I have used one). Please enlighten us.

> That is another very expensive part of it. It's required because you're often dealing with the unbanked who can't just have an exchange deposit money in their account. Again bitcoin doesn't solve this problem.

Wrong. My example (sendbitcoin.mx) absolutely does work with the unbanked. The recipient does not need a bank account.

> They do actually need a physical presence to compete with the services that have a physical presence. There are a lot of people who can't receive a bank transfer.

Wrong. As I explained, my example (sendbitcoin.mx) does not need physical presence, as they rely on an existing bank ATM network, even if you don't have a bank account.

> If it was so easy to do remittance using the ATMs surely the bank that owns the network would be doing it by themselves and raking in the money.

Banks don't do it for the same reason large companies often fail to innovate compared to small agile startups: inertia, redtape, etc.

[sanswork]

>By the way you still fail at providing any data why it was a "huge flop"

Fewer transactions and lower volume than last year. Multiple vendors on /r/bitcoin claiming little to no volume either compared to last year.

>I am confident you are able to find some anecdotes on /r/bitcoin from a few mom-and-pop shops disappointed by their bitcoin sales this year. But anecdotes are not data. Data is the "+82%" number I reported above.

Right so reports from multiple vendors about lackluster sales are anecdotes. A vanity number like 82% increase with no indication of the size of the transactions, etc is data. How about the fact that bitpay has been claiming the 1m a day in transactions now for over half a year? How about that for no growth?

>Their sales are not declining anymore. They have reached a steady state of $7000-8000 a day for the last 3 months

That is a decline

Here are the figures from their releases so far

Jan 10 - 130K Jan 11-29 - $26K/day average Next 36 days to March 4th they do $400K - $11K/day average Next 83 days to May 27th they do $600K - $7200/day average

Now they are claiming $7000 a day. Given that the $7200 * the number of days left in the year = $3m I'm guessing we'll see that $3m number change again when they actually release their financials.

>That's why cash works. You go to a restaurant and pay cash because you don't care about giving up the ability to contest the charge: you trust the restaurant

Cash works like this because you are physically present with the merchant when you use it so you can validate immediately if you are getting ripped off or not.

>Bitcoin doesn't have to satisfy 100% of use cases to be successful.

Right but it has to satisfy enough common ones to convince users to make the additional effort to acquire it. It's not doing that.

>I chuckled at this. Obviously you are unfamiliar with how it's done. The standard way of doing a "charge back" in Bitcoin is to ask the customer to provide a refund address. Easy peasy :)

Yes that explains why there are no scams in bitcoin at all. And there were no complaints about Tigerdirect fulfillment related to bitcoin orders.

>You completely ignored what I said: despite not losing money, it can be a tremendous annoyance and hassle to cancel and replace a CC, with the incident affecting your credit score, etc. These are real problems, real annoyances, NOT solved by credit cards. Bitcoin fixes that.

But it's not a tremendous hassle. You call the bank tell them the card was stolen(or they detect it) list any transactions you didn't make and the money is refunded and a new card is posted. There are a handful of cases where it is more difficult than that. Do you have examples of it affecting credit scores?

>Second time you completely ignored what I said: yes security is hard, but hardware wallets are improving security. You can't deny this.

Walk me through the steps to buying and putting bitcoin on your hardware wallet that wouldn't be compromised by the user having a virus on their computer that targeted bitcoin.

>They do work (I have used one). Please enlighten us

Which one have you used and I'll tell you how to abuse it.

>Wrong. As I explained, my example (sendbitcoin.mx) does not need physical presence, as they rely on an existing bank ATM network, even if you don't have a bank account.

That is a physical presence. The fact that they are using someone elses physical presence doesn't mean they don't need one. It means they are using someone elses locations to subsidize their own. Companies tend to not like that which is why I would put money on sendbitcoin.mx being shut down within the next 6 months.

>Banks don't do it for the same reason large companies often fail to innovate compared to small agile startups: inertia, redtape, etc.

Actually there were a lot of banks doing the US->MX remittance up until a few years ago when regulations and compliance got to be way too expensive for it to be profitable.

[timeal]

> Fewer transactions and lower volume than last year.

Again, for the 4th(!) time, you have no data proving this.

> Multiple vendors on /r/bitcoin claiming little to no volume either compared to last year.

A few anecdotes != reliable statistics

> Right so reports from multiple vendors about lackluster sales are anecdotes.

Yes. Your "multiple vendors" probably means "less than a dozen vendors", which is insignificant given there are tens of thousands of vendors in the world accepting Bitcoin.

> How about the fact that bitpay has been claiming the 1m a day in transactions now for over half a year? How about that for no growth?

Ha! Now you change your claim. You talked earlier about a significant reduction, a "huge flop". Now you claim stagnation, no growth. That's very different.

> Here are the figures from their releases so far > Jan 10 - 130K Jan 11-29 - $26K/day average Next 36 days to March 4th they do $400K - $11K/day average Next 83 days to May 27th they do $600K - $7200/day average > Now they are claiming $7000 a day. Given that the $7200 * the number of days left in the year = $3m I'm guessing we'll see that $3m number change again when they actually release their financials.

Sales were declining, but not anymore, not since September, not since the last 3 months. That is exactly what I claimed, and nothing more. I said: "They have reached a steady state of $7000-8000 a day FOR THE LAST 3 MONTHS" (emphasis mine).

> Cash works like this because you are physically present with the merchant when you use it so you can validate immediately if you are getting ripped off or not.

Exactly, and I am glad to see you acknowledge that Bitcoin's lack of CC-like consumer protections is a total non-problem in such scenarios. You made it sound like such protections were absolutely necessary, at all time, or else Bitcoin can never work!!!!!1!one

> Right but it has to satisfy enough common ones to convince users to make the additional effort to acquire it. It's not doing that.

Yes, and I think you will agree that "reducing fraud to zero for merchants" is a pretty major use case given that fraud is a huge problem for merchants online. As well as "being able to pay a trusted merchant online while guaranteeing not having a CC number that can be stolen" since financial theft is becoming more and more frequent.

> Yes that explains why there are no scams in bitcoin at all. And there were no complaints about Tigerdirect fulfillment related to bitcoin orders.

Technological problems from one merchant's deployment of Bitcoin is hardly a sign that "OMG Bitcoin totally doesn't work and will never be adopted" as you make it seem to be. For every customer who experiences one issue paying/getting a refund in Bitcoin, there are many more customers who do so without any problem.

> But it's not a tremendous hassle. You call the bank tell them the card was stolen(or they detect it) list any transactions you didn't make and the money is refunded and a new card is posted. There are a handful of cases where it is more difficult than that. Do you have examples of it affecting credit scores?

Obviously, whether it is a tremendous or a minor hassle is a matter of personal experience, and a matter of how much of your life depends on credit cards. But my point is: it can be a tremendous hassle, and credit cards do not automatically make a theft a non-issue. Some examples of major hassles: having you card stolen and having to cancel it during a vacation away from home. After a theft you have to re-configure all automatic periodic payments that were due to be processed on the CC. You forgot to give the new CC number to your cloud service provider? Oops they can suddenly shut down your instances at 3am with little to no notice. Your wife had set up some other random online service paid through the CC, but you were not aware of it? Oops her online account will be closed as fraudulent and it will take multiple phone calls and emails to the support department to get it re-opened. The CC thief's actions lead to some negative events added to you credit history? Oops good luck spending multiple WEEKS contacting the credit scoring agencies indepedentently to get your records cleaned up, and submit the proper documentation to prove it was all due to a theft.

Bottom line: you know how some Bitcoin fanboys blatantly ignore its kinks? Well you are guilty of the same thing when you blatantly and childishly ignore the kinks of credit cards when they are stolen and have to be replaced.

> Walk me through the steps to buying and putting bitcoin on your hardware wallet that wouldn't be compromised by the user having a virus on their computer that targeted bitcoin.

You mean the same computer where the virus will also steal the CC number that the user enters on a website when making a payement? Hmm? How does this virus scenario demonstrates that credit cards are safer? If the user cancels the first CC, gets a second one, what prevents the virus from stealing the second CC number at the next purchase? CCs don't solve this virus problem at all.

However I can envision scenarios where Bitcoin hardware wallets actually solve this virus problem. The simplest one is: you could buy a pre-loaded cheap disposable wallet (maybe in the form factor of a credit card) hence completely skipping the virus-ladden PC.

> Which one have you used and I'll tell you how to abuse it.

I used casascius's Bitcoin Address Utility. It has a self-escrow (two-party escrow) functionality which is not user-friendly, but the it is cryptographically well implemented and very secure.

> That is a physical presence. The fact that they are using someone elses physical presence doesn't mean they don't need one. It means they are using someone elses locations to subsidize their own. Companies tend to not like that which is why I would put money on sendbitcoin.mx being shut down within the next 6 months.

We shall see.

[sanswork]

>Again, for the 4th(!) time, you have no data proving this.

Go forth and compare https://blockchain.info/charts ignoring that the fact that they didn't mention sales at all is a pretty good indication.

>A few anecdotes != reliable statistics

A random statement about a random metric does not indicate growth

>Yes. Your "multiple vendors" probably means "less than a dozen vendors", which is insignificant given there are tens of thousands of vendors in the world accepting Bitcoin.

There are 10s of thousands of bitpay/coinbase accounts. That doesn't meant they are all still accepting bitcoin.

>Ha! Now you change your claim. You talked earlier about a significant reduction, a "huge flop". Now you claim stagnation, no growth. That's very different.

No change just another data point.

>Sales were declining, but not anymore, not since September, not since the last 3 months. That is exactly what I claimed, and nothing more. I said: "They have reached a steady state of $7000-8000 a day FOR THE LAST 3 MONTHS" (emphasis mine).

And given they change their numbers reported every few months I don't believe for a second it has stabilized. I'll wait for their year end.

>Exactly, and I am glad to see you acknowledge that Bitcoin's lack of CC-like consumer protections is a total non-problem in such scenarios. You made it sound like such protections were absolutely necessary, at all time, or else Bitcoin can never work!!!!!1!one

Yes, in face to face transactions bitcoin would be a good solution if cash wasn't already easier.

>Yes, and I think you will agree that "reducing fraud to zero for merchants" is a pretty major use case given that fraud is a huge problem for merchants online. As well as "being able to pay a trusted merchant online while guaranteeing not having a CC number that can be stolen" since financial theft is becoming more and more frequent.

The problem is consumers aren't willing to give up their customer protections to improve the rate of fraud for merchants. All the merchants in the world could accept bitcoin and that fact won't change. Why would you be willing to increase your own fraud window just to decrease the merchants?

>Technological problems from one merchant's deployment of Bitcoin is hardly a sign that "OMG Bitcoin totally doesn't work and will never be adopted" as you make it seem to be. For every customer who experiences one issue paying/getting a refund in Bitcoin, there are many more customers who do so without any problem.

I didn't say that. I said that they were a trusted merchant and they repeatedly screwed up. And the customers had no easy recourse like they'd have with credit cards.

>Some examples of major hassles: having you card stolen and having to cancel it during a vacation away from home.

What happens if you lose your phone/laptop while on vacation with bitcoin?

>After a theft you have to re-configure all automatic periodic payments that were due to be processed on the CC. You forgot to give the new CC number to your cloud service provider? Oops they can suddenly shut down your instances at 3am with little to no notice. Your wife had set up some other random online service paid through the CC, but you were not aware of it?

Given that bitcoin doesn't allow for automatic pull payments you have to remember all your accounts and manually pay them every month anyhow. This isn't an improvement.

>Oops her online account will be closed as fraudulent and it will take multiple phone calls and emails to the support department to get it re-opened.

Bullshit. No company is going to do this without contacting you and fraudulent? Seriously what world do you live in. This would never happen.

>The CC thief's actions lead to some negative events added to you credit history? Oops good luck spending multiple WEEKS contacting the credit scoring agencies indepedentently to get your records cleaned up, and submit the proper documentation to prove it was all due to a theft.

Notice you haven't shown a single example of any of this? Because it is fantasy.

>You mean the same computer where the virus will also steal the CC number that the user enters on a website when making a payement? Hmm? How does this virus scenario demonstrates that credit cards are safer? If the user cancels the first CC, gets a second one, what prevents the virus from stealing the second CC number at the next purchase? CCs don't solve this virus problem at all.

If a virus steals my CC details and spends on them I get the money back in my account. Does that happen now with bitcoin that I'm not aware of or do you lose your money for good?

It is not the same thing so I ask again. Can you walk me through those steps or do you admit you cannot do it easily?

>I used casascius's Bitcoin Address Utility. It has a self-escrow (two-party escrow) functionality which is not user-friendly, but the it is cryptographically well implemented and very secure.

What happens if we set up the transaction and I don't send you anything? Your funds are now trapped at no cost to me.