Curioulsy the number of transactions per day and their total BTC volume have increased very little, or not at all, since September last year. So, either commercial e-payments are a small fraction of those numbers, or they are not increasing (and their USD volume is actually decreasing, since the BTC price has fallen considerably in that period).
the price has not decreased since September.
Right, sorry for that. I meant to write that the USD/BTC price has fallen since
Februrary while the total BTC traffic has remained pretty much constant (~600'000 BTC/day).
Thanks, interesting information there.
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the creation of zero balances implies transactions and spending
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That is not clear... Addresses with zero balance could be created for many other reasons, such as sprinkling and collecting dirty coins to confuse detectives, stress-testing of wallet software, gambling, pay-out by miner pools, ...