This is a common topic, but I always see it phrased in reference to the customer. As a business owner who sell merchandise I can tell you that it is not an issue about why customers would like to use it. The issue is if merchants would be willing to accept it. The answer is NO. I wont and they wont, because there is no price stability.   

They cant do it with the wild price fluctuations. This is the problem that coinbase is having right now, they are having to cancel orders. I had a discussion about this the other day about SR. The way that they protect against instability is to offer hedged accounts. I personally believe that if it were to be tested it would fail if their was a repeat of 2011 crash I doubt that they would be able to cover the losses. (just speculation on my part). Same issue with bitpay. Every one is at the mercy of the price.

As for the legality.......... if they treat bitcoin as any other money and you pay taxes on it is there still a legal problem with that? Even if the government is still getting the same amount in taxes they would otherwise? Wouldn't saying they couldn't accept bitcoin be like saying they couldn't accept cash?

exactly. That is why they wont take it. It is just another currency that is not as good as what they have at the moment. Business like to know what to expect and you cant do that with BTC. Markets and merchants dont like volatility.

Okay I get that but bitpay takes ownership of the coin right? So if they take a coin valued at 20 and it drop to 2. You have an issue.

-offtopic-
You must be really bored to hang around at a forum discussing something dislike so much.
If you don't have anything to add to the discussion, how about you just don't..?
40+ hate/troll posts an still a bitcoin address in your sig..?


-ontopic-
I think it will take a while before, if ever, bitcoin will be accepted in the super markets. Just informing people about what bitcoin is and why it was invented will have to do it in the end.

Not if they sell the coin at Gox immediately.

The supermarket is likely the last place Bitcoin will make inroads.

Bitcoin main advantages are high speed global transactions, irreversibility, low tx costs, and psuedo-anonymity.

None of those are really applicable at the supermarket.   Credit card interchange rates vary ...  A LOT.  An online high risk merchant (porn) can have a rate that is more than 10%.  Add to it high chargeback fees, high fraud screening costs (both technology and labor), higher reserves, and high monthly gateway fees and the real cost can be 20% to 30% of purchase price or more.

Low risk, physical world merchants can have a discount rate of <1% (0.89% isn't that hard to get and Walmart recently reported negotiating a 5 basis point reduction in their discount rate to something like 0.79%).  Fraud is almost nonexistent and consumer non-fraud chargebacks are unheard of.   Using something like Bitpay (no offense to that awesome company) would RAISE the cost of doing business.

Now is 20-30 years if the Bitcoin user base is much much much (think hundreds of millions of global users) larger many shops will accept it simply because consumers will demand it but "supermarkets" aren't the low hanging fruit for the Bitcoin economy.

How does that solve the confirmation wait time?  You do realize that bitpay doesn't pay merchants until the payment to bitpay has been confirmed right?

So for everyone who bought coins in 2010 and sold them today they "lost"?

We hedge our risk of volatility very easily.  The intrahour volatility is pretty low most days and we keep a large enough reserve to ensure it doesn't affect our operations.  I am sure bitpay does the same thing too.

Did you every think that maybe you just aren't "good" at currency exchange?  I mean rather than accept reality and build systems which function with Bitcoin as is it seems pretty much on an hourly basis you just spread FUD.

Please don't take it the wrong way but maybe, just maybe you suck at being a currency exchanger.  Maybe the problem isn't Bitcoin it is just your lack of skill.