It's clear to me that you are actually what I call a "well-mannered troll". You come to a Bitcoin forum, not to gain perspective, but with the mistaken idea that thousands of engineers over five years have never realized what glorious knowledge resides in your skull. You are here to free us from our Bitcoin worship. Much like the polite religious folks on bicycles, with their flawed logic and repetitive arguments, when they meet an informed agnostic.

Eventually this goes two ways. In person, sometimes you can shake hands and leave, the religious zealot having given up. It can also become more and more aggressive, the tone of discussion becoming one of argument. On the internet this is far more common, as the inner troll begins to show itself.

We could do this all day if you were simply benignly slow. We love to help; that's why we write here when it does little for us but feel good to be helpful. But you are bordering on intentional anti-intellectualism. I don't believe it is rocket science to look at the simple two-column chart provided and infer that BTC is significantly better at delivering revenue to Reddit. Therefore you must be trying to ignore it (or deliberately not trying to understand it, which is the same), presumably to return to the religious aspect.

Bloomberg has an incredibly visible history of exclusively negative coverage of Bitcoin. Much like the LA Times. Independent journalism is nonexistent these days. Everything is editorialized. You might do well to start reading many sources and coming to a conclusion about the true equilibrium of truth. Otherwise you're no better than a Fox zealot, or an MSNBC loon. I won't argue with one of them, and I won't argue with you. You're taking time away from someone who is genuinely slow but open to new understanding. Go politely browbeat your economic religion into people elsewhere, please.

Thanks for the responses. So we all agree that merchants will have to incentivize people to use BTC then? Not as sweet of a deal as it originally sounded for merchants, but overall it appears as though they can still save a percentage point or two overall. So far...

Consider this:

Bloomberg ran an interesting article the other day that pointed to the fact that the BTC network pays for itself by releasing a constant supply of coins into the market (to miners) which acts to constantly drive the price of BTC down. This amounts to approximately 3.9% at current volumes. ** This percentage will surely go down with an increase in volume and decrease in inflation over time, but still in my opinion, AT BEST it will be 1.5% over the next eight years or so.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-02/bitcoin-is-an-expensive-way-to-pay-for-stuff.html

So we have we have 1% deposit fee onto the consumer, and 2-3% onto the merchant as an "incentive fee" in order to compete with CC companies. This averages out to 1.5-2% sum fee to both parties collectively. Put this on top of the 1.5(ideal)-3.9%(actual) fee exacted upon the markets by the maintenace of the BTC network, and we have a total of 3-5.9% overall cost to do business in BTC.

Getting expensive.

Would love to hear any and all responses. Thanks for your time.

** You can calculate this fee by taking daily bitcoins released (3600) and dividing it by the total daily volume in BTC. See this chart:
https://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction-percent