The reason is that people who buy on overstock or tigerdirect are just buying more bitcoin to replace what they spent. They originally bought the bitcoin as an investment, they are excited to be able to use it for something, but they don't want to exit their position.
I don't have any solid numbers to support this assertion, but I don't think anyone does. The takeaway is that the selling pressure is lower when you take into account the behavior of current retail bitcoin customers.
You don't have any data. I have spent 2 or 3 BTC and did not replace it. Occam's Razor says it is not likely that it is isn't lossy in spite of the best intentions.
Besides even if you are 100% correct, your point is irrelevant. If those merchants were increasing their savings of BTC instead, then there would be more upwards pressure on the fiat price of BTC.
Also remember M x V = P x Q. Thus increasing V increases P or Q (in our case we want Q which is quantity of merchants who hold BTC). You make the mistake of thinking value come from a equilibrium of stock. Rather value comes from flows. If the flows are actually occurring in the fiat, then the value from those flows is lost from BTC because there isn't an apparency of more money stock (M x V). Risto apparently can't do this level of math. In short, we increase the # of merchants who accept fiat, not who accept BTC. The switcheroo will later be trivial.
And there was also the issue that miners have razor thin margins now and must convert more to fiat.
The bigger issue is that we are building a merchant base that converts everything to fiat. This is what you are incentivizing. And it is compounding faster than adoption. Once you have a single service provider controlling all merchants, then no altcoin can be accepted (once they do the blacklisting on coins that don't carry full identity). And that provider will be controlled by the government. You say you want to get away from Paypal, then you hand control right back to Peter Thiel again.
Just go ahead 'tards to your centralized hell.
Any one serious about liberty is welcome to come help on something serious. Not this BS.
What fool would lose 3-5% spread (at least) on two times exchanges instead of paying 0% to spend the fiat with a credit card?
And cause a premature capital gains event.
And then only accomplish destroying our collective liberty.
Incredible powers of logic!
Serious parties are being contacted. And will reap incredible wealth because of it (and be able to hang on to it). You know who you are.
In spite of my disappointment (dejection and depression) in our moderator, I thank him for allowing me to post.
Bitcoin is wonderful for merchants (no chargebacks) but sucks and for consumers .
FTFY.
I used Etch-A-Sketch in kindergarten too.
Boycotting merchants who don't use BTC as their unit-of-account will prevent mass adoption. Thus we can now be sure that BTC is converting itself to fiat. And anyone supporting BTC and claiming it helps us get away from fiat is just full of BS.
It will depend on the quality of fiat. For the majority of the countries out there BTC is better than hard currency like the USD or EUR, because in many cases they have restrictions regarding foreign exchange. Convertibility to better quality fiat, which is regarded as "stable", is another issue though. But EU and USA are like 1/10th of the world's population, not 100%.
By the time the confiscation begin in EU (2015?), then you better pray you have a serious anonymous coin because Bitcoin ain't gonna help you hide it.
And Darkcoin's developer is actually saying he doesn't want to try to make it anonymous:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg6019142#msg6019142