this plot
that shows that the number of deposits per day into BitPay's receiving wallet was quite flat through most of 2014, and increased by a factor of ~3 since mid-2013; whereas this plot
shows that the bitcoin volume of those deposits has been constant at ~1000 BTC/day since Jan/2013. (Explaining these numbers is not trivial, but they definitely contradict the claims of "booming adoption", and are consistent with may other indications that usage for e-payments is stagnant at best.)
This sounds plausible to me. I would say that a stagnant usage for e-payments is quite good given the >1 year bear market (with the resulting decrease of new blood).
It is true that the "wallet" log provided by walletexplorer is not official, and may be missing some addresses that belong to Bitpay but were never used together with the identified ones. However, the data from that wallet is consistent with the little information that BitPay itself has released, and other indirect evidence. For example, the payment made by Josh Zerlan (of BFL fame) for his new home, which was announced in local newspapers and the bitcoin media, can be clearly identified there. The shape of those plots also does not show any indication of missing data.
As I discuss in Tim Swanson's blogpost, the flatness of the second plot is quite surprising (but, again, consistent with BitPay's figures). Not even the Nov/2013 bubble had any effect on the BTC daily volume (whereas it clearly affected the
number of deposits per day). Note that the price of bitcoin varied from ~13 to ~1200 and back to ~300 in that interval. I had expected to see the payment volume
in USD to change gradually, so there would be more BTC being processed when the price was low, and less when the price was high. The only explanation that I can think of for that flatness (and for the lack of a weekly pattern) is that the bulk of the BTC volume is miners spending their coins, which were produced at a constant rate of 3600 BTC/day through that period. But even that explanation has some problems.
Anyway, the discrepancy between the first and second plots suggests that the
number of deposits per day is dominated by e-payments with fairly small value, so that the bulk of those transactions account for 10% or less of the total BTC (or USD) volume processed. BitPay's own data says that, excluding mining, travel, precious metals, and gift cards, their e-payment volume in 2014 was about 500 USD per merchant in the whole year. By the 80-20 rule of thumb, I would guess that half of their 50'000 merchants did not make a single bitcoin sale in 2014.
