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BitPay troubles prove 'Merchant Adoption' never happened and prove bitcoin is a 'permissioned blockchain' (self.Buttcoin)

Bitfraud が 投稿

Merchant adoption of bitcoin was a lie perpetuated by the community in order to convince people that bitcoin was about to go mainstream. The bitcoin cult needed the aurora of legitimacy that real economy merchants provided. By misleading people with claims of 40,000+ merchants 'adopting' bitcoin, the cultists could portray bitcoin has having legitimate uses.

With Bitpay falling apart this curtain of deception has now been pulled back, revealing a toxic community hell bent on getting rich at the expense of others.

BitPay was a one way fiat exchange service. They did not eliminate banking costs but instead absorbed them. Bitcoiners proudly pointed to BitPay as the 'Paypal of Bitcoin' since they perceived it to be the first successful crypto business that was 'legitimate'. Criticism of BitPay being a glorified one way exchange service was repeatedly censored. Critics pointed out that BitPay was used to 'cashout' into precious metals and computer parts and contributed to the price decline. BitPay was used by community members as a way to gloss over bitcoin's rotten image.

Euphoria ensued as every BitPay merchant was pumped and promoted by the circle-jerk echo chamber desperate to see the value of their digits swell. The peak of this euphoria was the disastrous 'Bitcoin Bowl', where sleazebag CEO Tony Gallipi attempted to push bitcoin onto hot dog eating football fans.

BitPay stated numerous times they were counting on a rising bitcoin price to cover expenses. The strategy was based on deceptive marketting. By claiming that merchants were 'adopting' bitcoin, Bitpay was counting on consumers to do the same. Bitpay built it, and they never came.

This strategy was a complete and utter failure that anyone with a hint of practical reason could have forsaw.

The bitcoin blockchain is 'permissioned'. To use the blockchain one must obtain bitcoin. Obtaining bitcoin requires handing capital for mining equipment or handing capital for direct purchases of bitcoin. The amount of crypto currency one has determines how often one can use the blockchain. The blockchain is only open to those who can obtain bitcoins.

Bitpay never answered the question of 'Why would people want to use Bitcoin?'

Bitcoin has a high barrier to entry. To cross that barrier one must hand wealth over to a bitcoin seller for the tiny supply of marketable bitcoin at any given time. To get more bitcoin into the market the price has to be bid up. Bitcoin requires users to have existing wealth.

BitPay either did not understand how bitcoin worked or were caught up in the euphoria of engineered price pumps.

Merchant adoption of bitcoin never happened because 99.99% of merchants never touched bitcoin. If adoption of bitcoin by a merchant happened, why would they need to rely on a third party? Bitcoin is P2P rendering BitPay useless. Merchant's signed up with BitPay because bitcoiners would pump them all over the Internet. Many merchants would later discover that acknowledgement of bitcoin acceptance led to sales declines. Be wary of bitcoiners barring gifts.

Merchant adoption on a large scale was also technically impossible unless the entire supply chain adopted bitcoin. If merchants held BTC they would be exposed to the wild volatility as well as the wide bid/ask spreads involved in attempting to convert back to fiat. Think about it. Would any sane merchant go through the hassle of setting up an account on a shady bitcoin exchange?

Converting to and from bitcoin involves real costs, this includes paying the inflation premium to a miner, paying fees associated with the banking system, paying a volatility premium.

Bitpay's legacy is one of spamming the blockchain with people cashing out of bitcoin into precious metals and video cards.

Notice how after an 80% price decline, the entire ecosystem outside of cyber-crime is falling apart? The explanation is simple. Without a price rise into perpetuity bitcoin businesses have no revenue models.

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[–]DrMoneyMaker 4ポイント5ポイント  (1子コメント)

You are absolutely right. Bitpay from the start was a proof that merchants don't want to touch bitcoin. Any entrepreneur however wants real money and that is where Bitpay entered the scene. Problem is that nobody is actually paying with Bitcoin so Bitpay is not making a profit. End of story. Once Bitpay is belly up merchants will quickly remove bitcoin as a payment option.

[–]Bitfraud[S] 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Bitpay provided those with substantial capital gains and a bitcoin denominated income a convenient way to 'cashout', namely into precious metals which then could easily be sold for money.

[–]Economist_hat 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Bitpay never answered the question of 'Why would people want to use Bitcoin?'

No one did. Many people brought up this question in r/bitcoin in the 2012-2015 timeframe (that I have been lurking) and any real inquiry that revealed bitcoin's warts was labeled FUD and banned.

[–]this_user 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

So far paying with BitCoin has almost always gone like this:

1.) Butter buys butts

2.) Butter pays with butts, transferring them to BitPay

3.) BitPay sells the butts for real money which it transfers to the merchant

4.) Butter buys new butts

This is completely absurd while providing no benefit whatsoever. It merely creates another middleman who needs to be paid.

[–]wellllllllll091 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I get why you all rag on bitcoin, as a currency its complete shit because of volatility and because its so damn slow and features a complete lack of privacy. But crypto itself isnt to blame just the basic implementation of it that is Bitcoin.

You have to give credit though, there have been advancements in crypto like nubits which have kept a stable peg to the dollar without any centralized governing authority, essentially a decentralized central bank.

Then there is monero which is the only provably anonymous e-currency, anonymous by default not some frustatingly slow and gameable system like the coinjoin iterations (alts, mixers and other worthless schemes). Monero devs have claimed that the tps can scale linearly with the network, i dont know enough about monero to verify this but the rest of their stuff is pretty smart.

Now is this some panacea for online retail? Well any currency has to be easy to acquire and alot of what OP here is complaining about is only partly bitcoin related, the parts about it being accessible have to do with regulation and all the hoops customers have to jump through to appease the AML laws. Now you could say that crypto has the entrypoint that is mining, you can convert electricity into crypto very slowly and this gets around all the regulation but there isnt any solution to the high barrier to entry with this yet, miners will always congregate into pools and max out their equipment so that the common user can no longer join in.

As it stands now bitcoin doesnt solve anything except to provide censorship resistance, it could be replaced with a truly anonymous currency and stable crypto but that doesnt really solve what retail looks for which is ease of use and consumer protections which no be your own bank one way transaction system will ever provide.

So maybe we will need to have a monero-nubits-on-a-trezor-with-regulated-escrow-agents to actually complete with traditional payment networks.