Great expectations in store for Bitcoin Black Friday 2014

November 28 will mark the third occasion of Bitcoin Black Friday, which BitPay described in a recent blog post as “the largest day of the year for bitcoin purchases.”

BitPay stated that Bitcoin Black Friday 2013 was the most popular day in Bitcoin commerce history and provided some data relating to last year’s event. BitPay experienced a 6,260 percent increase in transactions from the inaugural event in 2012, and BitcoinBlackFriday.com received more than 100,000 visitors.

This year’s event “is poised to be another groundbreaking event for digital currency sales,” said BitPay, whose blog post offers several reasons why Bitcoin Black Friday 2014 will be bigger:

• Black Friday was by far the company’s largest day for transaction volume in 2013 with $6 million processed. Currently, the company processes $1 million in transactions daily.
• Many high-volume online merchants such as Newegg, TigerDirect, and Warner Bros. Records have begun accepting Bitcoin.
• PayPal merchants can now accept Bitcoin payments via BitPay in PayPal’s payment hub.
• Merchant acquirers such as Alternet Systems and Global Payments have partnered with BitPay to allow their merchant network to easily integrate Bitcoin payments.
• Point-of-sale systems DC POS, SoftTouch, and VisualTouch have integrated retail POS Bitcoin payments within their systems, offering Bitcoin acceptance to hundreds of thousands of new merchants.

Bitcoin Black Friday founder Jon Holmquist told CNBC that 1,200 merchants are expected to participate in this year’s event, which is looking to branch out the customer base beyond the realm of existing Bitcoin users.

“We have two things planned,” said Holmquist to CNBC. “First is the ability to instantly purchase bitcoin with your credit card: a small amount, like $25 worth. For most people, that’s not too much of a risk. And we’re also going to have a section [of the site] where you can purchase something for a small amount of money.”

Holmquist said the event has grown to the point where he had to bring on some staff to assist in organizing it for the past two months.

In an interview with CryptoCoinsNews, Holmquist said BitcoinBlackFriday.com will roll out a new feature that will make a lot of Bitcoin users happy.

“We’re launching a /private section of the website. This section will contain no javascript, cookies, or anything browser-side that could compromise an individual’s identity. It will list all of the deals and merchants. Additionally we’ll be cloning an optimized version of this section onto the TOR network. It will allow anyone to access all the deals while maintaining their own personal privacy,” said Holmquist.

While the event focuses primarily on Bitcoin merchants, Holmquist told CryptoCoinsNews that he has reached out to a couple of altcoins communities about offering an event with merchants that accept their particular cryptocurrency. He has reached out to the Dogecoin community on Reddit, and if they get at least 60 merchants to participate they will get a separate dedicated landing page for the event.