I was reading the report by SEMRush about online payments in Italy which is interesting because Bitcoin payments are at number 3 according to the analysis.
TLDR of above mentioned link:
October 2018 — September 2019
How many times different payment methods are used per month?
- Paypal 1,383,000
- PostePay 1,175,000
- Bitcoin 215,800
- American Express 189,000
The month in which the highest number of Bitcoin payments was recorded is June 2019 (368,000 times)
Giacomo Zucco, MIR and Lawrence Nahum had replied to a tweet about this:
https://twitter.com/giacomozucco/status/1190617052257693696
https://twitter.com/mir_btc/status/1190618368820297729
https://twitter.com/LarryBitcoin/status/1190625836652810240
Everyone is surprised which is obvious however I think the analysis includes visa and mastercard payments in PayPal category but not sure about it. Also source of this information is not confirmed and if it is based on surveys then more information about how those surveys were conducted is also required.
I could see few places accepting bitcoin payments on coinmap in Italy and one organization on cryptwerk. Purse can be used to buy things from Amazon using Bitcoin and its delivered outside US with an extra fee. Gift cards can be bought with BTC from Bitrefill. Also found few places accepting BTC in Italy on usebitcoins.info and there can be various other sources to collect information about BTC payments online for VPS, VPN, flights, etc.
I am not really sure about the numbers shared by lastampa.it, however if this data is even 60–70% close to truth then BTCPay, Blockonomics and few other open source Bitcoin payment processors should use this as an opportunity and increase the number of merchants in Italy who accept BTC payments.
Edited: Adding some links about Italian darknet markets
https://darknetlive.com/post/italian-police-busted-g00d00-a-prolific-darkweb-vendor/
