Recently Roger Ver and Jameson Lopp faced off on the Tom Woods Show regarding the question of Bitcoin versus ‘Bitcoin Cash’ (aka Bcash). We usually try to steer clear of the “politics” of Bitcoin, but some observations may be valuable without taking sides.

Most serious Bitcoiners use their coins for one thing: to “hodl”. Real true-blue Bitcoin advocates may spend BTC, but usually just to incentivize adoption — Bitcoin altruism you might say. But today we're giving you an incentive to spend bitcoin, and hopefully an incentive to would-be Bitcoin users too.

Team Spendabit has been working hard on a number of new projects, and today, for Bitcoin Black Friday, we are taking the opportunity to “soft-launch” a much-needed service in the Bitcoin space.

We are constantly tweaking our search algorithms. In addition, importing new merchants requires relentless work on our product-indexing and crawling code. Hardly a week goes by without numerous small upgrades.

With the Bitcoin price having a mostly upward bias recently, volatility has been a less-cited argument against adoption of crypto-currencies. Much of the chatter about Bitcoin's (lack of) stability seems to have subsided. But while things are calm it's probably worth reminding ourselves that the volatility will in all likelihood return. But also, and more importantly, we should remember that that's okay.

The attrition in the Bitcoin space has been relentless. The last few years have seen not only loads of small stores go out of business; a number of big retailers — most recently Rakuten.com — have stopped accepting Bitcoin as well.

Although we would like to remain as neutral as we can, perhaps a short statement regarding Spendabit's position on the ongoing “Scaling Debate” would not be inappropriate.

What does it mean to “Be Your Own Bank”, and why does Bitcoin make this possible?

Bitcoin has always drawn comparisons to gold, and since the ‘early days’ (ca., 2011) gold and silver have been a popular thing to spend one's bitcoins on. Back then, we had hobbyist-like outlets such as Coinabul (if not 100% reliable), and today we have more than half-a-dozen serious coin- and bullion-vending brokers — all listed on Spendabit!

A popular Bitcoin smear is to label it a “Ponzi scheme”. And recently, someone on Reddit was asking how to counter this claim. We took a little time to offer a response, and thought it worth expanding upon here.

Spendabit is pleased to announce the launch of Region Support (i.e., “localized” search) for all of the European Union. This presently includes more than one-hundred merchants from a dozen countries, but will include products from other EU countries as soon as Bitcoin-enabled merchants come online.

Spendabit supports the arts and growing the Bitcoin economy. Each week in May we will feature new Bitcoin-themed artwork.

Spendabit is pleased to announce our most notable search integration to date.

This is a pulse. (Note it, search-bots.)

Alongside our newly-revealed partnership with Ribbit.me, Spendabit is happy to announce the official launch of our Search Partners program.

Regular visitors to Spendabit and passers-by on our Twitter feed might have noticed a slow-down in new merchants recently. Even worse, you may have even experienced an outage of our website in recent weeks. We write to assure these are temporary phenomena, on the one hand due to some reorganization to our infrastructure, and on the other hand due to our working busily on a product we hope will make our efforts more sustainable.

Recently, we were asked by bitwhispers.com if we could answer a few questions about our service and about Bitcoin in general. See the exchange below to hear some of our thoughts on recent Bitcoin-related scams and hacks, what we see in store for the future of Bitcoin, and about some of the coals we have in the fire here at Spendabit.

Some of our team will be at the Free State Project's annual Liberty Forum event this weekend. Stop by our table and say hi if you're going to be there!

We were having some pretty serious, though intermittent, database issues over the course of the last week. We have not only tracked down and fixed that 'leak', but we have deployed a new backend for our Bitcoin Product Search Engine.

An increasing number of gold and general sound-money advocates have warmed up to Bitcoin in the last year or so, but most still appear to be skeptics.

Will you discuss politics at your holiday gatherings this year?

If you're a regular user of our “search engine for things you can buy with Bitcoin”, you may have noticed an increasing number of out-of-stock product listings or altogether broken links lately. This is a quick note to let you know the problem is being actively worked on (and for many products it has already been solved).

We've had a theory here at Spendabit, and with circumstantial evidence to support it, that people tend to spend fewer bitcoins when the Bitcoin price is down. But just last week, Adafruit (one of hundreds of Bitcoin-accepting merchants listed on Spendabit) put out a short blog-post featuring a chart giving further credence to our thesis, showing Adafruit's Bitcoin-based sales have gone down substantially over the past year, right alongside the market price for obtaining a bitcoin.

Spendabit is proud to announce the launch of our most requested feature to date, Region Support (aka, “Localization”) — just in time for the holiday shopping season.

A little over a week ago we attended the Midwestern Bitcoin Conference at Purdue University and gave a talk entitled “Why NOT Bitcoin?” The premise: to put one's self in the shoes of the critics and find the best arguments against crypto-currency, Bitcoin in particular.

To any passers-by, you may have noticed we're a little bit closer to having a proper blog — now with a proper landing page.

Just an FYI, some of our team will be attending the Midwestern Bitcoin Conference at Purdue University this Saturday. If you're going to be there, please come by and say hi!

Last week someone on Reddit was having trouble grasping the virtues of Bitcoin versus good-old credit cards. He listed a number of perceived pros for Bitcoin, but also what he saw as its cons — summarized here:

I've been saying it since I read the whitepaper: Bitcoin is the most important technological innovation since the Internet. Back then (in early 2011) it sounded crazy; today, lots of people say things like that.

Do you love Bitcoin? Do you drive on the wrong side left side of the road?

Spendabit is happy to announce you can now find the excellent lineup of precious-metals coins, rounds, and bars from Amagi Metals amongst the millions of products we index — all purchasable with your favorite digital money, Bitcoin! Amagi Metals is a particularly notable addition to our roster — they've been a longstanding supporter of crypto-currencies, and honest forms of money in general; not to mention, they were one of the first precious metals dealers to accept Bitcoin.

The price of Bitcoin may be in a downward trend, but the number of things you can buy with the world's premier crypto-currency most certainly is not.