For digital-marketing agency Cooperatize.com, taking bitcoin for payment was easy enough. All co-founder Roger Wu had to do was obtain a digital wallet. To promote the move in 2014, he even penned a blog post for Forbes explaining the decision.
The number of bitcoin transactions the New York-based firm has made since? Zero.
"The biggest thing is, are people willing to pay in bitcoin?" Wu said. "The reality is that most of our customers are other businesses, and other businesses don't use bitcoin."
Even as the euphoria over bitcoin reached a fever pitch last week as the stock price surged to almost $3,000, slow transaction times and inertia are helping to prevent it from achieving widespread usage. Adoption has slowed, according to Morgan Stanley, after a slew of companies from Microsoft to Expedia initially trumpeted its use, and hurdles remain when it comes to longer-term viability.
"We see few reasons for consumers to use bitcoin over a credit/debit card given that paying online with bitcoin represents a marginally more inconvenient way to pay," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a 33-page report released June 13. Processing costs for bitcoin and other digital currencies are likely to grow, they said.
Time and Dell said they've stopped accepting the cryptocurrency, with the computer maker citing low usage. When website content management system WordPress stopped taking bitcoin in 2015, founder Matt Mullenweg said usage was "vanishingly small," adding that it was initially incorporated for philosophical reasons, not commercial ones.
"It's quite possible that after a while you just realize it's not worth the cost of tooling up to take it and you decide to drop it if the publicity has run its course," said David Yermack, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Still, there's plenty of evidence the price surge has helped boost bitcoin's use — albeit from a low base.