Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

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> Not even close. Thousands of businesses accept Bitcoin. A few dozen accept Doge.

Very few real-world businesses, online of off, accept ANY sort of cryptocurrency. So much so that the big bitcoin lists of businesses that accept bitcoins are mostly made up of no-name and very low level online sites with virtual goods (hosting, email, sms, games, etc). They list a few dozen small online stores that sell real hard goods. The one notable exception is Overstock.com, though they don't accept bitcoin themselves. They just added Coinbase as a checkout option ala PayPal, WePay, Scrilla, Amazon Payments, etc (so they have no pricing in bitcoin and never touch bitcoin themselves since Coinbase does a BTC to USD trade immediately on purchase and gives Overstock.com the USD).

> Ah, you mean that stupid metric when you count the number of coins transferred?

Nope. Dogecoin has exceeded bitcoin in terms of number of daily unique transactions. Nothing at all to do with the number of coins transferred or available. Dogecoin sees about double the number of daily unique transactions that bitcoin does. That's pretty astounding considering that Bitcoin just celebrated its 5 year anniversary and Dogecoin just celebrated its one month anniversary. See: http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2014/01/14/dogecoin-tra...

> I disagree. Most people are not aware, that's true. But Bitcoin is serious business now.

Most people that are aware of it think its a silly bubble, pyramid/pump and dump scheme, and/or semi-interesting exercise in distributed computing/trust/etc. A small percentage of the people aware of it think it's serious and have put some skin in the game. I have some BTC some LTC and some DGC that I've been given but have never actually done anything with any of them.

> They list a few dozen small online stores that sell real hard goods

Dead wrong.

There are 2,700 physical stores that accept Bitcoin listed here:

http://coinmap.org/

Plus there are 90,000+ online merchants that accept Bitcoin via Spotify.

Plus there are some major companies joining every day, including Overstock and Tesla.

> Dogecoin sees about double the number of daily unique transactions that bitcoin does.

Ah, sure, but 99%+ of them is people tipping each other for fun on Reddit and other sites, and transactions on exchanges. They are not goods purchased, simply because there are almost no places to spend Doge.

Only 2,700 physical stores in the entire world is still 0.00% penetration. Zooming in on the map on NYC shows a total of 61 entries for all 5 boroughs of NYC and the entire surrounding area. For comparison, there are over 150 Starbucks in Manhattan alone. In my entire borough of Queens, only 2 stores take bitcoin and one of them is a just a POS company that is promoting a POS that takes bitcoin. I went and looked at the websites of a few of the other businesses listed around NYC and they made no mention of bitcoin. On a serious note, I'd be curious if a retail store can even properly take bitcoin in a standard retail transaction given that it currently takes around 10 minutes to confirm a bitcoin transaction[1], unlike cash which is instant or credit card which is 5-10 seconds.

[1] Source: http://blockchain.info/charts/avg-confirmation-time

> Plus there are 90,000+ online merchants that accept Bitcoin via Spotify.

I think you mean that 75,000+ online merchants have the option of accepting bitcoin via Shopify if they decide to enable it. Shopify merchants must explicitly enable it (it's off by default) and there have been no numbers released on how many have.

> Plus there are some major companies joining every day, including Overstock and Tesla.

As discussed previously, Overstock isn't pricing in bitcoin or assuming any of the risk of bitcoin. Overstock never even touches it, just letting Coinbase be a 'pay via' vendor ala PayPal or Google Wallet and only dealing in USD for pricing and their actual payment from Coinbase done via a realtime conversion of BTC to USD. Mind you, I'm not minimizing that as it's still a pretty big deal.

Tesla doesn't accept bitcoins. That Tesla S from the story in December was purchased at a 3rd party dealership in USD that were converted from bitcoins. The story that he walked in to a Tesla dealership and bought it with bitcoins was a bit of an exaggeration that some bitcoin fans seem to keep repeating.

> Ah, sure, but 99%+ of them is people tipping each other for fun on Reddit and other sites, and transactions on exchanges. They are not goods purchased, simply because there are almost no places to spend Doge.

Quite true. But it's still very impressive for a cryptocurrency only one month old compared to the 5 year old bitcoin. When bitcoin came out, people used it to tip each other and do silly things on reddit, too, but nowhere close to the numbers you see from dogecoin now.

Doesn't matter, your "few dozen" was a complete lie.

So, your misremembered/wildly incorrect/completely made up 'facts', and repeated false rumors don't matter? And yet it's a 'lie' to correctly point out that multiple bitcoin store lists online only list a few dozen stores that accept bitcoin and sell hard goods? Think I'll refrain from feeding this troll further.

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