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Comment by aquadrop | Hacker News Reader

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions

I don't see any growth. Also, 70k transactions/day - one average shopping mall.

Wow, that's amazingly low. Especially because I'm guessing most of these transactions are just mixing services. I wonder how much represent actual transfers of wealth between individuals? I would guess less than 1K per day, which would make it incredibly low compared to all the hype bitcoin has got.

Indeed. In searching around to find something to compare these numbers with, I found that Walmart alone processed 10 million register transactions in 4 hours on Black Friday in 2012[1]. Even if all 70k bitcoin transactions every day were actual purchases (rather than shifting money around), it'd take 5 months to do what Walmart did in 4 hours.

1. http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2012/11/23/walmart-us-r...

It has grown by a factor of 4 in the past two years (visible when you switch to the 2 year or 'all time' scale).

That hardly tells anything about consumer adoption though, but about trade volume.

That's true. Still 100% growth per year is not exactly 'no growth'.

Absolutely, but the numbers are still incredibly low. The customer adoption is only at a few thousand transactions per day. Those numbers would have to go up at least hundredfold for Bitcoin to be taken seriously as a currency.

Bitcoin is only 4 years old. Maybe it just takes a little longer to take over Visa in transaction volume? I really don't know what people like you expected.

If it proceeds to double in size every year then the numbers will stop being 'incredibly low' very soon.

The point is it isn't doubling every year. Averaged over 4 years it has but over the past 12 months it hasn't grown at all.

Apparently they don't have to go up at all for it be taken seriously by Newegg, Overstock, Dish, and Tiger Direct.

That's true, and every time a new company begins accepting it, there is a slurry of stories about it in tech publications.

I'm surprised more retailers, particularly those specializing in tech, haven't begun accepting bitcoin. They can accept it on terms they dictate and it's easy publicity.

You don't the publicity is more important than the amount of commerce transacted on it? Every one of these companies get the press when they indicate they accept bitcoin. I remain skeptical as to how many are doing any sort of volume in bitcoin transaction

The biggest problem with Bitcoin being taken seriously as a currency is its investment value. If there is anyone using it to pay for goods and services, then they are most likely buying back the amount they spent. So there is not much reason to use this on sites like newegg.

A crucial missing data point is that Coinbase does all their transactions off-chain. If you send Bitcoin via Coinbase to a friend, it doesn't get reported on this chart. They have their own accounting system.

Bitcoin at its current stage cannot handle many transactions, as you point out. However, this doesn't mean there isn't a plan to make it handle many more transactions. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability for more.

And coinbase stopped reporting their volume after they were caught out fudging the numbers. I think people vastly overestimate how much off block chain stuff they do.

Note that many Coinbase/Bitpay/whatever transactions will be off-chain - much like PayPal, you can have an account balance that is just transferred in Coinbase's ledger but doesn't actually appear to be transferred on the block chain.

I thought transactions like that weren't supported by the bitcoin protocol. Are there any resources that explain how this works with the general blockchain?

It doesn't work with the general blockchain. If I have 1btc in my coinbase account and I send it to your coinbase account then it never shows up on the block chain.

I think people hugely overestimate how much volume is happening with this though.

https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&s...

Of course it doesn't have that much growth. Everyone is trying to get rid of their overvalued dollars and euros :).

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