Bitcoin has been around for almost two decades. Almost nobody spends it. I keep
meeting people who own coins and have not bought a single thing with them this year.
Myself included, for a long time.

I want to start with why I care, because it explains the rest.

I used to run an e-commerce shop. I sold wigs I made myself. It was a hobby that turned
into a small business. One day an automated system flagged my store, and it was closed.
No warning that made sense, no appeal that worked. I had already paid for materials and
finished a batch of custom orders. I could not ship any of it. I ate the loss.

I did not do anything illegal. An algorithm decided, and there was nobody to talk to.
That is the part that stayed with me.

This is also one of the reasons I originally chose to join the OpenBazaar community.
When OB1 walked away from the project in 2021, a group of us from that community picked
up the code and kept going. It has been almost five years now. We still use the
OpenBazaar codebase and have been iterating on it, but the core idea is the same one
OpenBazaar had.

It is an open marketplace where you can buy or sell almost anything: new goods,
second-hand items, things you make, digital goods, a skill, an idea. You can open your
own store, or start a market for your own community and run it yourself. I want to be
clear that we are not trying to replace Amazon, eBay, Etsy or Shopify. Those work for
the people they work for. The point is that inside crypto there is no single place where
all of that exists at once.

How it works, in plain terms. No KYC. Real peer-to-peer trading. Your store, your data
and your customer relationships stay yours. Payments use 2-of-3 multisig, so no single
party can move the money alone. There is a full dispute process with independent
arbitrators, because a marketplace without a way to settle disagreements is just a place
where scammers meet. You can run your own node. Privacy and commercial sovereignty are
the point, not a feature we added later.

There is also a side of it I did not expect to matter as much as it does. We have
gathered a group of suppliers who hold stock in a number of countries. If you want to
sell but have no capital and no idea what to source, you can pick products from them and
upload them with one click. They store and ship. You sell and get paid. That takes
cross-border logistics and sourcing off your plate.

One more thing about what you can sell, because this is where we differ from the big
platforms.

A lot of what people actually trade online now is not a physical object. It is an
account, a gift card, a game item, a subscription, a piece of software, a design, a
template. On most marketplaces those listings get removed automatically, sometimes along
with the seller's whole store and balance. We do not do that. If you made it, if you
bought it, if it is yours to sell, and it is legal where you live, that should be your
decision, not a moderation queue's.

The supplier side covers a wide range too: home goods, accessories, travel items,
electronics, clothing, digital products. If you want to start with physical goods, there
is stock you can list today. If you want to start with something you made yourself, you
can do that as well.

The line is at anything that is plainly a crime. We do not allow that, and it does not
move. Violence, theft, fraud, anything that hurts people. Selling your own account, or a
gift card you paid for, is not in that category. Nobody got hurt. It is your own work or
your own purchase. That distinction matters, and I think most platforms stopped making
it years ago.

Now the part I actually came here with. Here is the closest thing I could find to what
people really buy with crypto.

In 2024, consumers worldwide used cryptocurrency to buy about 13.6 billion dollars of
goods online. That was 0.20% of e-commerce transactions. By 2026 it is projected at 39
billion dollars, or 0.5%. Put another way, out of every thousand dollars spent online,
two dollars are paid in crypto.

The mix of coins is interesting too. According to CoinGate's checkout data, bitcoin's
share of crypto checkouts was 35.4% in 2023, fell to 21% in 2024, and came back to 23.3%
in the first half of 2025. USDT went from 25.5% to 39.7% and then 24.8% over the same
period. Litecoin sits at 13.6%, Ethereum 9.4%, USDC 9.3%.

On the merchant side, around 15,000 businesses worldwide accept crypto, and 58% of those
accept bitcoin. Three quarters of the merchants surveyed say they plan to accept it
within two years.

Two things stand out to me. The absolute number is small enough that most people will
never pay with crypto in a shop in their lifetime. And the growth is happening mostly on
the acceptance side, not on the shopping side.

Which brings me to the part I find hardest to say. We have tried to promote this, and
what we keep running into is that very few people actually buy or sell with crypto. Not
"few compared to Amazon". Few in absolute terms. Some days it makes me question whether
I am five years early or five years wrong.

We are running an invitation program to try to change that. If someone registers through
your invite link with your code and then sells an item, and the trade completes without a
dispute, you get 2% of that sale. It runs for a year, and if things go well we will keep
it running. It is not much, but it is real money for bringing a real seller.

So my questions for this forum, and I would rather have the harsh answers.

When did you last actually pay for something in bitcoin? If the answer is never, what
stopped you? The asset going up, the tax headache, not trusting the seller, or the whole
thing just being more work than a card?

And: what would have to exist for you to spend bitcoin on an ordinary purchase? A
particular kind of shop, a refund policy you trust, prices that do not move, or nothing
at all, because spending bitcoin is simply irrational while it appreciates?

If you think this whole direction is wrong, say so. I have been at it for five years and
I would rather hear it from you than figure it out alone.