Topic: New Indicator: Number of sites accepting bitcoin - page 6. (Read 16391 times)

How does your service get around money laundering and anti terrorism legislation in the USA and other countries?  Do people who want to transfer money have to identify themselves with sufficient ID?  This is more a follow up to the original question of transferring money between countries, and bitcashretail.com was cited as the answer to that.

Also you have at least 2 spelling errors on your front page.  "onvert" and "BitCashRetai.com"

"BitCashRetail.com is designed for Merchants and Sellers to get the maximum rate of return on what they have to sell at no cost*"

"* Some fees apply, please read the Terms Of Service"

Aren't these two statements directly contradictory?

http://bitcashretail.com

Can we please get a list of all those sites?
Lol seriously, It's too hard to google bitcoin accepting merchants.

I believe the "killer app" for bitcoin would be a payment processing service. Making smallish payments across borders is very troublesome and expensive, and I think various third parties could easily compete directly against credit card companies and Paypal.

This is what I have in mind:

A US-based company that can make bank transfers (write checks or make direct deposits) to US banks. The company holds a largish amount of BTC and USD in an exchange and hedges itself against fluctuations in BTC value. The recipients provide their identification to the company so that the payment processing company can cooperate with law enforcement and comply with money laundering laws. The money senders just send BTC (and remain anonymous if they so wish), the processing company covers its costs (+profit) with fees and then just sends the USD to the recipients. Everything is perfectly legal, I think. And even if the fees might initially be higher than even Paypal, I believe there could be demand for this service.

I don't think it needs any "hit", it already has everything it needs to succeed. With all the potential in gambling, porn, gaming (these are not to be laughed at, we're talking about significant markets) and the fact that Bitcoin is great as a store of value for very-long-term. A good shield against inflation like gold, but more convenient.

This role will be more valued when the market gets bigger and the price won't be so dominated by speculation. This stability can eventually be achieved by both increased usage as a medium of exchange and increased usage as a store of value.

All of this added with the fact that some pretty neat ways of paying with Bitcoins both online and physically have already been developed and are going to be developed further. And the low fees don't hurt either.

Of course Bitcoin needs more publicity and massive marketing, but all of that will follow once the potential of Bitcoin is fulfilled further. I see the June peak as only the peak of the hype wave that had a lot of expectations for Bitcoin. That was the beginning. Now we're recovering and it'll take a long time for the economy to truly develop which will start the next wave that'll be more based on what's actually been done and what's going on, not what we expect to happen some day.

This is a long struggle and everything is in the hands of the enterpreneurs developing the Bitcoin economy. Are they going to despair because the price has been on a downward spiral, or will the think clearly of what Bitcoin can do, and work on it? This will decide if Bitcoin really succeeds or not.

If we had a list of "companies that have accepted at least 1000 bitcoins", that might be useful. Below that threshold, it's just something being toyed with as a promotion.

To be honest, we need a lot more than this, btc needs a major hit, otherwise it will die.

This is a good indicator that gives us a picture of the long-term prospects of Bitcoin. Something to think about while the price looks for a new, and very likely final, bottom.

Wonder if there's a way to show how big Silk Road's market is

updated

The good news: The Bitcoin Economy^® is still growing at steady pace.
                       I also noticed people working on evaluating valid entries on the list at en.bitcoin.it/wiki/trade
                       THANK YOU GUYS!!!

The bad news: I still am not dirty rich!

And what about all the sites that are accepting Bitcoin that aren't on the list.

updated

Updated.

Although the entries alltogether may not respect the exact current status, evaluation of existing entries seems to be in progress, as I have noticed that some entries have actually been deleted, while new ones were added during my last count.
However, the work in progress seems insufficient in order to keep pace with the changes done to the lists. If you've got some time left and would like to see this indicator grow up to a reliable statement of the current bitcoin economy, I'd highly appreciate if you could check some of the entries on the lists, whether they still exist and accept bitcoin.

Thank you,
-Spekulatius

Exactly, before we try to make any indicators off of the page, we need to have someone go through and actually verify all of them first (and check back regularly).  We have to work at the speed of Internet.

The trade page is not an accurate reflection of who accepts Bitcoins right now. I conducted a small sample recently of one sub-section (educational software), and found that only 3 of the listed businesses still seemed to be accepting BTC. My own unscientific impression of the market at the moment is that there are quite a lot of sites that thought about accepting BTC, but no longer do.

Sadly, the number of btc-accepting businesses on the wiki aren't reliable indicators because the wiki doesn't include black market stuff.

I mean, it's better info than most of the technical "analysis" garbage I see around here, mubmo-jumbo with charts and stuff, but it's still skewed. I'd say Silk Road does more btc-related biz than pretty much every site listed on the wiki right now... they've got over twenty thousand members. Do you think any of those other btc businesses have had twenty thousand unique hits? I doubt it very strongly.

All the same, good idea OP, keep us updated. I used to check the trade page history every day.

Oh my god! The bitcoin witch struck again  




Yep, totally agree.
Unfortunately I'm a complete no0b in programming anything. If anyone's up to the challenge it would be much appreciated

Source.


Also, wouldn't it be better if somebody write a program to automate said data gathering of such effort?

What's a scource?

thx