Topic: Number of Merchants Accepting BTC Payments Surged by 174% in 2023 (Read 276 times)

Transactions that go through LN are instant, when you receive an invoice, you simply make the payment and everything is done in a few seconds. And as for merchants, it is true that there are a lot of them in Europe, but North, Central or South America is not far behind. These data are publicly available and you don't have to guess where the most of them are.

https://btcmap.org

It is what we need to take for serious now because Merchant from here and there are accepting
bitcoin now and also other altcoins are available in many merchant but what I wanna see in my place is that crypto will
also accepted and not just limited places.


Satoshi's plan is taking place now , though recently another trouble comes to bitcoin as the
congestion really hurt users and consider using altcoins now instead of bitcoin that is why some changes may take place
 if the miners wanted bitcoin to stay on top of al altcoins.

   "5,107 accept lightning-powered Bitcoin payments." I'm just curious here: is the process fast? All I know is that most merchants who accept Bitcoin payments are actually from Europe. But there are still many countries that are not that open to Bitcoin being used as a payment method in businesses.

   Then, when there is a crisis in Bitcoin fees due to ordinals and inscriptions like what happened recently, will it still be good to make Bitcoin a payment method when the fee deducted from the transaction is expensive?

Possible reasons:

• High costs of transactions — it's impractical especially in smaller, developing countries for costs of transaction for a single tx. Slower confirmation times too, is an inherent issue. There's almost no reason to transact in Bitcoin vs traditional payment methods
• Adoption rate still low despite decent growth — there is only a subtle increase in adoption of Bitcoin in developing countries.

Businesses survive if they make profit but they won't be able to price their goods at a favorable rate due to the additional costs bitcoin adds as transaction fees. Faster confirmation times and ultra low transactions fees will push bitcoin adoption by businesses.

In my opinion - this is a sign that bitcoin will further spread its wings to gain wider adoption. Many countries have considered adopting bitcoin as a means of payment - but countries such as Asia and Africa have not done so due to regulations. But I am sure – many countries on these two continents will consider adopting bitcoin if many other countries have already started it and benefited from it.

Maybe - such countries need more time to assess and consider adoption, but should not lag far behind many other countries that are already moving forward in the industrial sector. We may soon get more countries announcing that; they are starting to adopt bitcoin instead of just legalizing its trading.

BTC cannot 'kill' fiat and that is not even what it was created for, BTC is p2p electronic cash that is an alternative to fiat, so even if mass adoption becomes a reality, people would still use fiat currency more than they use BTC, take note also that BTC does not stabilize economies. High tx fees is also another reason why BTC cannot be used widely for payments, nobody wants to spend $3 on tx fee because they want to make a payment of $20.

That is what I observed and thought intriguing. Personally, my first assumption when following bitcointalk forum and observing the userbase of crypto related sites, my conclusion is that Bitcoin is much likely to be stronger and more popular in African and Asian countries, because there are lots of people from these continents around, while even though I see people from American and European countries present on the community as well, they seem to be less in numbers. However, when we check businesses which accept BTC as currency, the reality is the opposite.

Now I don't know anymore if it was just my personal impression, or if the point is that Africans and Asians are really more into crypto industry than everyone else, although they don't have where to spend their coins and tokens at local businesses.

Yes. That's what I was talking about. Good to see that Bitcoin adoption is increasing every year. But, if transaction fees increase every day, merchants won't dare to accept Bitcoin as a payment method. We all were expecting the fees to go down a little bit, but it seems some ordinals started to pump again because Bitcoin is pumping.

More market movements lead to more transaction volumes, which leads to a congestive mempool. The fee increased to 80 sat/vB at this moment which is high already. But, it may go up further. Now, let's see if merchants open lightning networks to accept Bitcoin payments.

A few posts above yours, I quoted a part from the article posted by the OP, and there you can see that only a little less than 50% of sellers accept LN, which means that for those who have the knowledge, paying with Bitcoin can actually be much cheaper than fiat. Payment processors are something that definitely makes sense for on-chain transactions considering the volatility that is present with Bitcoin.


Sometimes that also makes sense, because usually people like to spend Bitcoin when they have profited from it - so all those who, for example, invested when the price was around $20k or even lower, may not even see a problem in paying $3-$4 for fee in case that the value of the transaction is several hundred $.

what are some popular merchants that accept btc payments?

There are many popular merchants that accept Bitcoin payments. Some of the major companies that accept Bitcoin as payment include Microsoft, AT&T, Burger King, KFC, Overstock, Subway, Other popular merchants that accept Bitcoin payments include Pizza Hut, Starbucks, Rakuten, and many more
The number of global merchants accepting Bitcoin as a payment method increased nearly threefold in 2023, reaching around 9,926 merchants by the end of the year, I think hopefully we can see more merchants will accept bitcoin in this year.

Still such a small number.
Most of the merchants accepting btc and others must be in Asia I think.
Japan I see the btc payment option quite frequent to be honest, sometimes even at bigger department stores, which is very surprising.
In 2020 I bought my new macbook at a department store with btc, even got a low % discount because of choosing btc as a payment option. 

And on our latest ski trip to Hokkaido I saw it as an option in a ski resort restaurant, it has come a long way.

This year I was in Hong Kong twice and while I already consider it an absolute crypto hot spot anyway because of the many ATPs and exchange shops I was also pleasantly surprised by the many shops that accepted crypto. I hope in 2024 it will grow much more than just 1,74x!

I remember last 2017-2018 bull run, we also experienced this. Some businesses started to accept but later on, when the traffic increased in the Bitcoin network the transaction fees started to become expensive also, some businesses started to halt their Bitcoin payment support.
I can see it's normal, it will still be the decision of the businesses.

I'm not saying nobody will ever accept altcoins. But its never going to become a thing. Nobody wants to bother taking random crypto tokens as payment lol.

Merchants don't accept bitcoin because barely anyone in the world uses Bitcoin so it's not even worth their time to set it up and maintain it as a payment option yet. So why would they ever start adopting random crypto tokens that have barely any usage at all. They won't. It'd be silly.

The rare merchant these days that accepts bitcoin along with a few random alts probably doesn't have a clue about the differences between bitcoin and other cyryptocurrencies so they just accepted a few of the more popular ones. Sort of like how it became popular to lump Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and BCH together when companies tip toe into the cryptocurrency world (whether accepting as payments or opening up investment services) simply because they don't know any better and Litecoin used to be important and BCH was never important but at least was valuable for a few months so those four sort of became the "main cryptocurrencies" in some people's minds who don't actually know anything about crypto and haven't noticed two of those are entirely irrelevant these days. But anyone in the market would laugh at the idea of lumping random stuff like LTC and BCH in with BTC and ETH.

But as I said nobody in their right mind is going to be accepting alts as some legitimiate form of payment and alternative to bitcoin.

The idea that alts can simply replace bitcoin because they have smaller fees is based on not having an understanding about the vast difference between bitcoin and crypto. Bitcoin is money. Crypto ain't. Crypto will never be used for payments. Crypto is for trading and for messing around with individual crypto apps. It is very far from being money and merchants aren't ever going to accept it as money (with the possible exception of merchants directly in the crypto world, like obviously something built on Ethereum will take Ether or whatever random token its built to be used with).

Sure the occasional merchant will experiment with them simply because they don't know what they are doing. But there is only one cryptocurrency that is money and could ever widely be used for payments, hence why I said the idea that altcoins would be accepted is crazy, cuz it is lol.

This shows that we are gradually winning the massive adoption course. The adoption of BTC and its payment system across the globe will be fast paced when the globe properly understand the concept behind the technology.

Satoshi's vision to have a decentralised system void of trust on a digital scale and having an immutable ledger is just about what an average person yearns for but they are yet to understand that a room has been created for such yearnings in the tech space.

Well maybe because bitcoin is more exposed or known in american and european country, why bitcoin is being used and know in other country but their government are hesitant and doesn't have idea about the existence of bitcoin, that's why business can't adopt bitcoin or crypto currency payment method, while in america an europe in this country even the government doesn't fully adopt and accept crypto currency its up to the business on what payment method they will allow and yes most businesses in this 2 country arr taking a bold decision by adopting crypto currency payment, maybe a part of their strategy as in these country there are a lot of cryptocurrency holders or investors so it is not surprisingly thay these countries is stated to have a high percentage of business who accepting crypto currency payment method, its not an easy implementation but still someon is starting this kind of system which is a good indication that more and morr business might adopt crypto payments.

Yes, it's mostly in Europe, and If I'm not mistaken, Germany has been one of the countries that readily accepted Bitcoin since 2018 whether online or offline. But in Africa although it's one continent wherein there are a huge explosion or growth as far as bitcoin usage, only few are accepting it same as Asia.

Just to insert though, with the issues of high fees and mempool congestion, there could be some stores that might no longer accept or stop it for the meantime although LN could be a good alternative. But let's say, bitcoin is fairly young, and maybe in the next 10 years it will stabilized and use as how it was designed by Satoshi, as a payment scheme.

It looks like there are merchants who are not in their right mind because some mechants I saw online also accept altcoin as an option for their payment.  Some of them are also accepting ETH, BNB and other established altcoins.  Although their main cryptocurrency to accept is BTC.



Bitcoin for sure will be the main cryptocurrency for cryptocurrency payment options but in times of transaction fee surge, merchants will gladly continue to accept cryptocurrency so they put an alternative from Bitcoin to not disrupt their sales transactions.  As stated in the earlier reply, no one in their right mind will pay 10 plus dollars for a transaction worth $3 or less.

I wonder how many merchants discontinue accepting Bitcoin when the ordinals transaction spam attack is at its height.  I wish that the article was precise in that it also mentioned the decline of merchant percentage during the late quarter issue of high transaction fee.  Regardless, it is always great to know that Bitcoin is moving forward to mass adoption,

This is very good news because Bitcoin is getting stronger and getting more popular but for those who are accepting Bitcoin as a part of their method option are mostly in the advance countries and not the African countries. Though some countries in Africa have accepted to use Bitcoin but the people that are accepting it in their shops or stores are very few and it not up to 0.001% . And if really every shop accepts Bitcoin in my location and I can use it to pay transport then we have indirectly killed fiat currency because people will be using Bitcoin more than the fiat currency. And the economy of the country will be stabilized to some extent.

In European countries and also America, the adoption rate for Bitcoin is quite high, apart from that the infrastructure they have is also supportive, whereas in other continents such as Asia or Africa, there are still many countries that do not have clear regulations regarding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies they consider only fiat should be used as a transaction tool.
with the adoption of bitcoin continuing to occur in European countries and also America, this will automatically encourage other countries to consider using bitcoin as a way to improve the economy of their citizens, but the thing that in my opinion will have a negative impact on bitcoin when adoption occurs is fees will definitely rise high, and that will already happen in 2023 when the ordinal protocol appears.

The nations have some of the best economies in the world. Bitcoin is gradually becoming a currency of the rich, so you don't expect companies in developed nations to adopt Bitcoin payment because most people are below the poverty line. These nations also have high literacy rates which helps in Bitcoin education and adoption. The bottom line is that more people use Bitcoin in these nations, which will encourage companies to accept Bitcoin payments. American and European nations also have advanced infrastructures and technology that make Bitcoin transactions easier and more convenient. Some countries in Africa lack electricity and internet facilities, therefore you don't expect companies to promote Bitcoin payments. Another reason might also be government policies. Most of these nations that are experiencing an increase in the number of merchants because these nations have favourable policies.         


Privacy is one of the benefits of using Bitcoin for making payments. The high transaction fees might be discouraging but privacy is also a great advantage. Using decentralised wallets and platforms is the best if you want to maintain privacy. But those who don't care about privacy use centralised platforms.

Correct me if I'm way off base, but if a merchant accepts crypto at all, they're most likely using a payment processor like Bitpay which by default allows you to pay with coins other than bitcoin--and if that's true, then there would be no logical reason for anyone to pay with bitcoin when network fees are so absurdly high.

Then again, if what you've got is bitcoin (and not an altcoin like LTC, for example), you'd still have to convert it to whatever altcoin you're going to use, and that would probably be even more expensive.  Eh.  I think it's great that bitcoin is being adopted by merchants, and the more the merrier I say.  But I've always questioned people's willingness to spend their bitcoin on goods & services when fiat works just fine.

This just goes to show that the world is becoming more and more receptive and accepting of the crypto industry. They know that it's here to stay and best way to deal with it is to actually work with it closely, which is why more and more large-scale companies are starting to adopt crypto as a payment/financing option. But in my opinion, global adoption of crypto wouldn't really happen if the micro-infrastructures like small-businesses and establishment refuse to take the chance to adopt cryptocurrencies for themselves. In third-world countries this is especially more essential since impoverished people couldn't be expected to buy stuff wholesale, or at least in the same way that regular middle-class to high-class income earning families could. Crypto would need to penetrate this sphere as well to really hit the "decentralized and for everyone" slogan home and include everyone in its economy. Plus it would be a massive bummer for everyone if massive AAA companies are to take control of this market yet again.

All in all though, this isn't a bad first step honestly, we're looking at the makings of a massive crypto revolution that may bring about global adoption within our lifetimes, that's a massive win for me anyday of the week. Just hoping that the power's still within the people's hands when that happens though. Cause what good is global adoption gonna do if the outside market doused in capitalism's still going to dominate the crypto market anyway.

this is good news but also confusing for me, because how can these merchants accept bitcoin when the current fees are unreasonable. do these merchants expect that buyers will be willing to pay a fee of 4 dollars just to buy a drink? because only a fool would do that. or do they use binance for payments with bitcoin? because as far as i know binance does not charge fees for transactions between their users. this is still a question for me.

That's a good percentage gain. But yeah hardly anyone takes bitcoin payments. I'll take a couple decades of that sort of growth before bitcoin payments start becoming standard. But that's fine, it takes a while for a currency to organically grow from a single person to global adoption. No one should be under any illusion that paying with bitcoin is going to be normal any time soon. It'll be many many years before the average person could live off off using Bitcoin. Of course once the major online marketplaces like Amazon adopt bitcoin payments, which I'm guessing will be some time next decade, that'll give a big boost but still its gonna be a bunch of years after that until bitcoin payments are as widely adopted as something like Apple Pay.

Mid 2023 is also where the gradual rise of the value of BTC, I could only assume these merchants are also looking to maximize their profit while BTC price is going up. There will be more merchants to join soon when they hear accepting BTC as payment will be profitable.

But I would strongly recommend also accepting stablecoin along with BTC as this will give options to the BTC users. These merchants may even prefer the stablecoins when the bull market is over. Its best that they are prepared on what to do when the time comes.

There's this thing called the Lightning Network. Nobody is going to be doing on-chain transactions for buying things, that would simply make no sense.

And nobody in their right mind is going to be accepting altcoins as a mode of payment. Bitcoin is going to be the only thing that gets widely used as payments. Altcoins are random tokens nobody cares about that serve no purpose accept for trading. They will never be a payment method. Please don't tell me you still think altcoins are trying to compete with Bitcoin as money, that ship sailed like 5 years ago once the market figured out that altcoins are nothing like Bitcoin. If every altcoin suddenly disappeared tomorrow that would have zero effect on the future of digital payments.

I think BTC is awesome way for making transactions, just that I have seen its more popular payment method with people who want to stay anonymous, some how people who are willing to share their KYC, they still prefer paypal, and credit/debit cards.

It would be good if you read the article from the OP, which is only 3 minutes of reading, so some things would be much clearer. From the data, we can say that the ratio of merchants who accept Bitcoin as a means of payment is close to 50-50 when it comes to on-chain and LN.

As for the number of merchants, I think that it is greater than the number presented, and I conclude that from the fact that many are missing when I looked at the data on the map for my country (btcmap).

We see such news popping up every time when bull run is in place and especially when halving is near.
It has become common now to see the number of merchants increasing when bitcoin is in hype.
But we must find out how much of these merchants keep using bitcoin and doesn't abandon it later.

Just accepting, not surprising facts. The question is, are there transactions there, I mean their customers actually pay with bitcoin?
If my government allows it, I can just put labels on shops "accepting bitcoin here" then the media says the statistics are increasing, but that doesn't really suggest that adoption was increased especially if there are no customers who want that kind of payment.

 It should be clear that the demand for transactions in cryptocurrency could be the major thing that triggered the increasing number of Merchants in Europe and America

The high transaction fees have been a problem lately and will drastically reduce the number of transactions that the Merchants will carry out these few months we have been experiencing high fees. They may stop transactions in Bitcoin if fees go way high than what we have currently, instead will start using other cryptos like LTC, XRP and the rest of them that have lower transaction fees in running their businesses.

I think the main reason for that is the excessive bureaucracy created by government, taxes and so on. Merchants wants only to sell their products or services, without permission or regulations from theses thiefs called politicians

There are a few restaurants here in my country that accept Bitcoin as payment I tried one of them before but their menu the list of food and beverages is a bit expensive I am lucky that they offer a 20% discount if I pay Bitcoin. At that time Bitcoin network was not congested unlike these days but Bitcoin is growing here in my country more restaurants and other merchants are accepting Bitcoin as a mode of payment.
Until now they have accepted Bitcoin but the problem is since there is an issue on the network like stuck transactions due to network congestion they stopped accepting Bitcoin unless you are willing to pay a high transaction fee. Their alternative mode of payment is Lightning and no altcoins yet I don't know why they don't accept other coins but they only accept bitcoin mainnet or lightning.

Does anyone have the stats of how many Merchants stopped accepting BTC payments in the last three months only? I guess nobody has the stats! I asked this question because of obvious reasons. The fees! The ordinals thing changed everything in the last three months. Still, people were paying 500 sat/vB to confirm their transactions.

The transaction fee has been reduced to 40 sat/vB this week but it started to increase again. If transaction fees remain like this, The Merchants will stop accepting Bitcoin payments. If mempool goes back to normal mode again, more merchants will start accepting BTC payments.

I think there are many news talk about merchants start to accept Bitcoin payments, that's good. But I'm more curious how many people are actually pay using Bitcoin and how much that they paid, so we will know does accepting Bitcoin make the merchants profitable or not.

We can also know if the users already understand about Bitcoin or not by checking the price of product they buy is higher than the Bitcoin fee they paid.

If we are going to follow up by the updates of what's going on daily with increasing acceptance of Bitcoin and adoption of it's use as means of payment by institutions, we can't keep the count because this is happening daily and the network is fast more increasing than before, even to the extent that we are not aware of some and yet they are happening, bitcoin indeed has been unstoppable by any means.

Away from government regulation and all that, the biggest thorn to Bitcoin adoption is the recent surge in transaction fees caused by the ordinal spam on the network and I believe we are yet to see the worst during the bull run. If that is not addressed, I see very many merchants opting for altcoins instead as a mode of payment.
Nobody in their right mind is going to spend $20 in fees every time for just a payment of $3.

Am not surprised this is happening, alot would still happen as the bull run draws even closer, my country government just listed the ban on crypto-currency this could be an advice to them seeing everyone in the country has an idea or by now should have heard about Bitcoin one way or the other.
I paid a friend who sells me call card with Bitcoin yesterday, this is a great improvement not just that big online merchants accepting Bitcoin but just those small everyday needs service providers in your area accepting Bitcoin then you know the adoption level is increasing.

Bitcoin Adoption: Number of Merchants Accepting BTC Payments Surged by 174% in 2023

Regulations are claimed to be helping to increase Bitcoin adoption by businesses as payment method around the world. Is this for real, or are regulations just forcing such businesses to officially accept Bitcoin, although they could be already accepting it informally before the approval of such regulations?

Despite the raised percentage being really expressive (174%), it doesn't translate in great numbers when we conclude there are only 9926 businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment method in the world.

In your opinion, why do you think more businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment method are concentrated in American and European continents?