>No, BBF 2014 was a huge success

Notice they changed the metric from the number of sales to the number of merchants? Because it was a huge flop.

>"Both Gyft and NewEgg experienced their best day of bitcoin sales ever"

Congrats to those two companies. That doesn't change the fact that the event was a flop.

>You are wrong, which is why you quote no source.

I quote no source because I'm too lazy to go search through the /r/bitcoin posts. Go search for accepting/started/etc then contact the merchants and see what they say. Better yet search for "no sales" or similar, search for complaints about coinmap they generally revolve around a store not receiving any sales, getting rid of bitcoin and having the user be stuck. Or look at Adafruit.

>CheapAir recently passed $1.5 million in bitcoin sales

It's been over a year since they started taking bitcoin we have no indication if they are seeing growth or shrinkage in sales with just one figure.

>Newegg, although they quote no numbers

Enough said.

>Same thing for Overstock who decided to expand bitcoin acceptance to their international market.

This being the same Overstock that recently announced they missed their bitcoin target by $17 million dollars? Overstock is helpful in that they release their figures regularly so you can plot the decline in sales on a chart easily.

>The most important problem that Bitcoin solves is fraud

It solves fraud for merchants by removing consumer protections. Merchants having no fraud doesn't matter if no one uses it because they don't want to get screwed over by merchants. (Look at all the complaints related to Tigerdirect and bitcoin orders).

>And conversely, Bitcoin solves the problem of financial theft for customers: if Joe Schmo decides to pay a trusted merchant like Dell in bitcoins

Note the trusted part? What about all the millions of other merchants online? Or do you expect everyone to centralize into a few trusted retailers? Besides that there are plenty of trusted merchants who make mistakes sometimes that require charge backs. With bitcoin you're out of luck.

>he can be assured that if Dell is hit by hackers who steal CC data, they won't be able to financially steal from Joe

If they steal his CC data he can be sure they won't be able to financially steal from him either since he is insured against loss by his credit card company.

Unfortunately for Joe he isn't a security expert and his odds of losing money due to accidentally installing a coin stealing virus are way higher than the odds of him losing money due to Visa not accepting his fraud claim.

>cryptographic 2-party escrow to deal with untrusted merchants

A new one appears every few months at which point I post the reason they don't work and the developer moves on.

>The most expensive part of the business is the requirement to have physical presence --offices and employees-- to deal with the need to be able to handle cash deposits and withdrawals

That is another very expensive part of it. It's required because you're often dealing with the unbanked who can't just have an exchange deposit money in their account. Again bitcoin doesn't solve this problem.

>Bitcoin services make this cheaper because they don't need physical presence. https://www.sendbitcoin.mx for example accepts deposit by sending coins to their service, and they rely on the ATM network of an established bank for withdrawals.

They do actually need a physical presence to compete with the services that have a physical presence. There are a lot of people who can't receive a bank transfer.

Sendbitcoin.mx will not be around for long once the bank they utilize finds out they are using their service for remittance because they are avoiding all regulations which make remittance to MX expensive. If it was so easy to do remittance using the ATMs surely the bank that owns the network would be doing it by themselves and raking in the money.