Thank you.  So you agree that paying with bitcoin is attractive only to people who already believe in bitcoin and own a sizable pile of bitcoin; and increased "bitcoin adoption" by merchants only gives those bitcoin holders more incentive to sell their bitcoins.

Fee usually include a % of the amount involved, so you don't save that part by doing bulk transactions.

"Hey, I see that Dell now allows payment by Mongolian Virtual Vouchers!  Cool! I think I will buy some 10'000$ worth of Mongolian Virtual Vouchers and wait for an interesting offer to come up, just to learn how they work."

It is quite possible of course that he has other coins beside those known to be "Satoshi's coins", and has been spending those.

Sigh. The values don't matter.  Can't you really see that there are MORE bank transfers when going through bitcoin? 

Perhaps an example helps.

Suppose @RPietila is now in the US (to simplify the example) and wants to buy a bottle of fine French wine that costs 500$ if paid in cash at the store -- just the current market price of 1 BTC -- with free delivery to @RPietila's location.  The wine merchant "accepts bitcoin" through Bitpay.

GOING THROUGH BITCOIN:

Years ago, when the price was 3$/BTC, all fees included, @Rpietila bought (say) 1.03 BTC for 3.09$

Today, @Rpietila clicks the bitcoin payment option and is directed to a Bitpay form that specifies the amount of bitcoin he must send, which is 1 BTC plus (say) 0.03 BTC to cover all the costs and fees.

@Rpietila transfers 1.03 BTC to the Bitpay address, shown on the form.  Let's suppose there is no fee for that.

Bitpay sends 500$ to the wine merchant's bank account. Pays a bank transfer fee for that, let's say 5$.

Bitpay sends the 1.03 BTC to Bitstamp and puts it up for sale.  Let's suppose there is no fee for that.

@JayJuanGee deposits 520$  into his Bitstamp account. Pays a bank transfer fee for that, let's say 5$.

@JayJuanGee buys the 1.03 BTC for 515$ (suppose that, by miracle, the price hasn't changed). Pays a trading fee on that, let's say another 5$.

@JayJuanGee withdraws the 1.03 BTC.  Let's suppose there is no fee for that.

@Bitpay now has 515$ in its Bitstamp account.  Withdraws 510$ to its bank account and pays a withdrawal/bank transfer fee of $5.

NET RESULT:

Bitpay paid 505$ (including one bank fee) and received 510$ (after all Bitstamp fees).  The 5$ difference is their processing fee.

@RPietila paid 3.09$ and got to enjoy a bottle of fine wine worth 500$.  He has the same amount of bitcoins that he would have if he did not buy those 1.03 BTC way then.

@JayJuanGee paid 525$ for the privilege of paying the rest of @Rpietila's wine bill (496.91$), plus three bank transfer fees, the Bitstamp trading fee, and the Bitpay processing fee; but he now has 1.03 BTC more in his hoard, nominally worth 515$, that he may be able to sell to @Erdogan tomorrow and thus pass that privilege on to him.

WITHOUT GOING THROUGH BITCOIN

@Rpietila clicks the bank payment option and gets the wine merchant's bank account #.

@RPietila sends 500$ to that account, pays a bank transfer fee of 5$.

NET RESULT:

@RPietila paid 505$ and got to enjoy a bottle of fine wine worth 500$.

CONCLUSION: Left as an exercise.

Imagine someone who invested in Nov or Jan-Feb at >800$, expecting sizabe gains, and watched instead his investment gradually lose value while being unable to cut his losses because of the 6-month lock-in period.  Or someone who bought in May at 450$, saw it go to 650$, and then drop back to 480$ -- and could not cash the profit, for that reason.

Think again.  You have dollars in your bank.  To buy the item you must get a certain amount of dollars in the merchant's bank.  What are the steps (a) to pay through bitcoin and (b) to pay in dollars?

Sigh. Can you please list ALL the fees that you pay when you purchase with bitcoin as you described, and the fees that you pay when paying directly with money?

(Don forger that you must send money to Coinbase/BitpayPayPal/exchange or whatever in order to buy th ebitcoins, and that Coinbase/Bitpay/Paypal has to send the money to the merchant.)

Why?

Actually most businesses that "accept bitcoin" accept through Coinbase/Bitpay, and they sell the bitoins.  If the Paypal announcement is legit (and is about bitcoin), isn't PayPal simply competing with Coinbase/Bitpay? 

If that is the case, Coinbase/Bitpay will be in trouble.

It would be some work, but not much $.

There is no answer to that.  Bitcoin has no intrinsic value (ahem!).  The demand for use in e-payments is unknown today and more so in the future, because of competition from other payment methods (including other cryptos) and from bitcoin IOUs rather than actual bitcoins.  Apart from that, there is only demand for investment and speculation -- which is the price holding itself up by its bootstraps.

From that article:
Bitstamp 40% of volume?

My tuareg friends told me that they saw CoinDesk's credibility last year, wearing a fake beard and riding a camel through Timbuktu on her way to Samarkand.  But they are not sure it was her.


Good try.  Actually, a unicorn trader told me that there is less volume on the exchanges today because people are using 100$ dollar bills instead of 10$ dollar bills to buy bitcoin. 

It is certainly a glitch, it has happened in other charts before.  Their chart software is rather crude (and apparently they don't read their own thread in this forum).

Interesting that the coins that are moved in the blockchain have been moved, on the average, oly 5 days earlier.

Anarchy, exemplified by a set of free independent self-governed monkeys:

Monkey #1: Finds banana
Monkey #2: Snatches banana from Monkey #1
Monkey #1: Tries to get banana back from Monkey #2
Monkey #3: Helps Monkey #2 beat the hell out of Monkey #1
Monkey #1: Throws feces
Monkeys #2 and #3: Throw feces
Monkey #4: Sees banana lying on the gound, steals it and eats it
Monkeys #1, #2, and #3: Run in circles looking for banana

Natural justice outcome: Random monkey eats banana, other monkeys don't

But for those scenarios the relevant quantity is market price,  not market cap.  Or, rather, (size of largest lot considered)*(mean price for sale or purchase of that lot).

The market cap is (market price)*(total issuance); why would total issuance matter, if only a small fraction of it can be traded at that price?

Would that be sufficient, or should I have started the question with "Is it possible that" instead of "Or maybe"?

Is the market cap a variable worth considering?

Person Z,  creator of the X coin, mined 1 trillion coins in the first hour after creating the currency.  After giving out those 10 coins to A, B, C, and D for free, he sold one coin to himself for 1$.  Presto, the market cap is 1 trillion $, and his friends's hoards are worth 10$...

Market cap is a meaningful concept for items whose market liquidity is close to the total issuance.  If all owners of Apple stock (or even gold) were somehow forced to sell all their holdings on market within one year, their total revenue would be fairly close to the market cap.   That is not true for cryptocurrencies, not even for bitcoin.

Perhaps you meant to say that A, B, C, and D bought their coins at 1$?  In that case one should exclude from the "market cap" any large hoards acquired well below market price? Or replace market cap by total invested capital (sum of the dollar amounts that current owners paid for their coins, plus interest perhaps)?

EDIT: I take back the "even gold".  I have no idea of what woudl happen to gold price in that scenario.

Is that a forex Ponzi?
https://laxotrade.com/

Or maybe he wants to scoop out its insides and sew shut its openings and smoke it out and stuff it with straw and hang it over the door of his hut to ward off evil spirits?

One way to get harware at a 100% discount:

* Advertise high-performance, low-consumption mining rig to be built and delivered in 2-3 months.
* Collect thousands of pre-orders at >5000 USD unit price.
* Build or buy those machines in record time.
* Move those machines to a massive "testing facility"
* "Test" the machines for months, and keep all the bitcoins that they mine.
* When the machines become uneconomical, ship them to the customers.

One can repeat this with several generations of mining equipment.

This method has been tested, and works!