I have a problem with using merchant adoption as a metric.

If you'll recall my story I've told here somewhere before, I created one of the 1st bitcoin merchant directories and scraped the web for something like 25 thousand merchants who accepted bitcoin on their website... In 2013. By fall 2014, 99% of those listings had no mention of bitcoin on them anymore.

Sadly, bitcoin acceptance was seen, during every bull market, as a new way to attract customers without taking the time to learn about bitcoin itself. Even after multiple cycles now I'd be willing to bet that 20k of those original 25k vendors don't accept it right now because they don't see bitcoin as being in a hype-crazed bullrun yet. -But they probably will again next year, if they're still in business.

To use this data as a real metric for overall adoption we're going to have to weed out all of these 'fair weather merchants.' Maybe some kind of requirement of keeping the 'bitcoin accepted here' sign on your website/kiosk for over a year would be a good start.

There's no way my scrapebot could have been tweaked to do that, however. It would need a manual process, especially for the IRL merchants.