Bitcoin has a long way to becoming mainstream

I’m a bit of a bitcoin enthusiast. I run a small web business called CRON-O-Meter that lets you do detailed nutrition and fitness tracking. The free version is ad-supported, but users can upgrade to a premium ‘gold’ edition with no ads and premium features. In June, I added Bitcoin (using BitPay) as an additional way to purchase gold subscriptions, to the existing options of credit-card (using Stripe), and PayPal.

I even placed the bitcoin option above PayPal:

Serious kudos to BitPay, who’s API was super simple and easy to implement, test, and deploy in just a few hours. BitPay gives retailers the option of instantly converting some or all of received bitcoins instantly to USD. For the record, we’re keeping ours all in bitcoin, and hope someday we can pay some of our hosting expenses and contractors in bitcoin, rather than fiat.

So far, after 4 months, the results have been pretty underwhelming. Just 0.73% of our purchases have been made using bitcoin, and PayPal is still the dominant option our customers choose.

This shows how far bitcoin still has to go before one could consider it a mainstream payments choice. I’ll revisit this in an update post in another 6-months to a year and see if things have changed.