This is the issue I struggle with ATM. Realizing that every transaction that goes through Bitpay results in an immediate sell order at whatever the current best bid price is on Mt. Gox will actually help drive the valuation lower. We need more speculators and big investors putting the money up to counterbalance this with an upward trend.
The blindness is bizarre. How can you ignore the fact that the BTC used in the transaction also has to be bought with fiat? In order for the BTC to be sold on Mt. Gox by the merchant, it first has to be bought by the customer (on Mt. Gox perhaps). The two currency transactions balance each other perfectly.
I guess you missed the part where I went on to say
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I guess I would also argue that buying BTC with fiat then immediately spending and having bitpay convert it back is basically a zero sum game.
They do indeed balance each other out going this route; my initial thought you quoted above was for the way bitpay functions in general, which is to take BTC already in circulation and process them when they are spent at bitpay merchants. I probably didn't explain that line of thought fully... these days my brain seems to be all over the place.
