Australian Cryptocurrency Expenditure at Retail Businesses - January 2020

The Bitcoin Cash mission

Bitcoin Cash aims to be the first global electronic cash system, and in order to achieve this goal, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain must host all the world’s economic activity - every citizen, every merchant, every business, every country.

The importance of physical merchant expenditure

This report seeks to highlight the performance of Bitcoin Cash at the physical merchant which is ground-zero for any coin aspiring to become the first global electronic cash system. If your coin is not gathering merchants today, it can not be considered long-term credible - it has no future.

Sourcing Data and Data Policy

When a peer-to-peer electronic cash system such as Bitcoin Cash is used by merchants, it is difficult to determine physical merchant trade as there is no central point of sales data aggregation. Merchant data must be collected from each merchant willing to share it, however recently some merchants have begun to use the HULA, an underwriting application that sheds some light on this hidden peer-to-peer network. By gathering HULA data and pinging individual merchants, a measure of the physical Bitcoin Cash merchant trade can be conservatively determined. 

Also, a small percentage of BCH transaction data from a handful of BCH merchants that have yet to migrate from the declining TravelByBit payment system was sourced from the TBB website.

In time, more BCH merchants can be included to provide a more comprehensive picture of the true Bitcoin Cash physical merchant trade in Australia,. Even without full data coverage, we can conservatively say Bitcoin Cash trade vastly exceeds all other physical merchant cryptocurrency trade combined.

Examining cryptocurrency usage

Most Bitcoin Cash merchants choose to accept only the Bitcoin Cash cryptocurrency because:

1. Practically all physical cryptocurrency trade in Australia is denoted in Bitcoin Cash. Merchants will typically only ever see Bitcoin Cash customers such is the low frequency of other cryptocurrency usage in the space.

2. Merchants do not need to invest extra time and money in staff training to support other coins when these other coins represent such a low combined volume of trade.

3. A merchant can field a best-in-class payment experience by harnessing the very high speed of Bitcoin Cash. When coupled with commonly available instant-pay facilities of today’s wallets, Bitcoin Cash becomes seriously next-level, out-performing even the fastest fiat payment systems by a wide margin.

With these advantages in mind, Bitcoin Cash captured 92.65% of physical merchant trade ($40,845) in the month of January.

Conclusion

Physical merchant cryptocurrency trade in Australia continues to be dominated by Bitcoin Cash, which is outperforming all other cryptocurrencies combined by a factor of more than 10.

Speed improvements and the new instant-pay facility incorporated into Bitcoin Cash wallets are responsible for a step change in an already superior Bitcoin Cash payment experience. A huge shout-out to the team at Bitcoin.com who have made many recent speed and feature gains on both sides of the merchant’s sales counter. Such impressive Bitcoin Cash infrastructure is contributing to the impressive adoption figures and the widening adoption gap over other coins.

Given the importance of the physical merchant trade in highlighting the utility of Bitcoin Cash, it is clear Bitcoin Cash has the performance and community necessary to fulfill its mission of becoming the first global electronic cash system.