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

Most likely they quoted this number because 10 or 20 or 30% "increased sales" sounded less impressive. It doesn't really matter. The reality is that there are 82% more merchants who completed sales than last year, so no it was not a huge flop. By the way you still fail at providing any data why it was a "huge flop". Second time I have called you on this, and second time you ignore me. Burying your head in the sand saying something does not make that thing a reality.

> I quote no source because I'm too lazy

You quote no source because you have no source.

I am confident you are able to find some anecdotes on /r/bitcoin from a few mom-and-pop shops disappointed by their bitcoin sales this year. But anecdotes are not data. Data is the "+82%" number I reported above.

> 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.

Their sales are not declining anymore. They have reached a steady state of $7000-8000 a day for the last 3 months: http://www.coindesk.com/overstocks-2014-bitcoin-sales-miss-p... But I am sure you will ignore this piece of so called "data" and continue shouting around that "overstock sales are declining!!!!1!!one"

> Merchants having no fraud doesn't matter if no one uses it

"if no one uses it" -> that's the thing, people actually use Bitcoin, and pay with it: Newegg, CheapAir, Overstock, etc. So it really does matter to such merchants that Bitcoin removes the risk of fraud.

> Note the trusted part?

That's precisely my point: most sales are performed with trusted merchants. It is OK for a payment system to not provide the consumer protections of credit cards. That's why cash works. You go to a restaurant and pay cash because you don't care about giving up the ability to contest the charge: you trust the restaurant. For the same reason, when I go to a local restaurant accepting bitcoins, I have no qualms paying in bitcoins. There are SOME transactions for which Bitcoin does not work well out of the box, like paying an untrusted online merchant without escrow, but that's OK. Bitcoin doesn't have to satisfy 100% of use cases to be successful. You seem to see Bitcoin as binary: it has to be perfect or it can't work at all. But you are wrong. It is just like cash or credit cards: they don't work in 100% of use cases either (can't send cash online, my CC can't be used when I encounter the 3rd merchant of the day who only takes Visa/Mastercard but not my Amex), yet they are successful payment systems.

> Besides that there are plenty of trusted merchants who make mistakes sometimes that require charge backs. With bitcoin you're out of luck.

I chuckled at this. Obviously you are unfamiliar with how it's done. The standard way of doing a "charge back" in Bitcoin is to ask the customer to provide a refund address. Easy peasy :)

> 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.

You completely ignored what I said: despite not losing money, it can be a tremendous annoyance and hassle to cancel and replace a CC, with the incident affecting your credit score, etc. These are real problems, real annoyances, NOT solved by credit cards. Bitcoin fixes that.

> 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.

Second time you completely ignored what I said: yes security is hard, but hardware wallets are improving security. You can't deny this.

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

They do work (I have used one). Please enlighten us.

> 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.

Wrong. My example (sendbitcoin.mx) absolutely does work with the unbanked. The recipient does not need a bank account.

> 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.

Wrong. As I explained, my example (sendbitcoin.mx) does not need physical presence, as they rely on an existing bank ATM network, even if you don't have a bank account.

> 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.

Banks don't do it for the same reason large companies often fail to innovate compared to small agile startups: inertia, redtape, etc.