Bitpay is a way of converting crypto into dollars before then passing it onto the vendor. In theory that vendor is accepting the dollars and its Bitpay who handles the crypto itself, not exactly a crypto transaction. Hopefully they are also monitoring other methods of exchanging value not just ones that register in FIAT because that'd be quite ironic to skip transactions purely done in crypto
Bitpay was (is?) the largest payment processor for Bitcoin. They are seriously hurting Bitcoins usage as a means of payment though. They started mandating that BIP70 is used for payments. This put a bad taste in many peoples mouth and caused many users to stop using Bitpay altogether. I'm unsure why they mandated BIP70 for payments, but it just overcomplicated things. I am certain that this has to do with the drop in commerce, and is what skewed the results of this "study". Maybe it's also in part to the fact that Bitcoin has been in a slump since 2017. A lot of people are likely hodling because of the general perception that we will be entering another bull market shortly, and buying something would result in a net loss in the short term.
This is yet another example of a clickbait headline by Bloomberg that misrepresents Bitcoin to make it look like we're all heading for a crash and it's not worth investing in. Bitpay, like mentioned above, is just a service, not the coin itself. So there was a shitty service that charged too much money for its transactions that people aren't using anymore and... no one is using Bitcoin anymore! Great conclusion Bloomberg!
interesting points here! they became difficult to use for some (bip70), and expensive to use for others. i'd love to see a survey among those who've used bitpay and their feelings about the "network fees" and mandated bip70 usage. if less and less people are using bitpay, there could be other reasons for it too.
i've recently used a couple large merchants who didn't use bitpay (they used coingate and coinpayments). so bitpay is the biggest game in town by far, but i'm not convinced they own the market either. i think maybe their market share is even falling.
BitPay is a US company and it is processing a lot of transactions, it basically owns a big database of bitcoin transactions, where they came from, where they went and how much each person owned and it is associated with a lot of additional data such as IP addresses and personal information possibly gained from the merchants they are processing these transactions for....
they may not care enough about losing a little bit of market share to competition if they are getting paid by some agency for this database... wink wink.
