user129: Does there exist a chart documenting the number of bitcoin merchants over time, and if not, would it be possible to create one from any available data source?  (I'm thinking mostly of https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade for source material)

user22: I went through the last 500 revisions of the wiki page, pulled the byte count into excel and graphed it. Line count would probably be a better metric but I didn't have a readily available data source for that. If someone wants to write a script that wget's each revision and counts the number of  tags that might be more accurate, but here's 500 revisions worth of data as a chart:

500 revisions goes back to Jul 8, 2011.
Also of interest, the earliest revision (Feb 10, 2011) of the Trade page has a scant 117 <li> tags while the current page has a whopping 785! I haven't taken the time to count all the revisions inbetween but that's quite a lot of growth - 668 new entries in 225 days for an average of almost 3 entries per day or about 1,084 per year! While some of these are bound to be non-merchant list items, that's still an impressive rate of growth.

129: <p>Does there exist a chart documenting the number of bitcoin merchants over time, and if not, would it be possible to create one from any available data source?  (I'm thinking mostly of <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade" rel="noreferrer">https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade</a> for source material)</p>
 22: <p>I went through the last 500 revisions of the wiki page, pulled the byte count into excel and graphed it. Line count would probably be a better metric but I didn't have a readily available data source for that. If someone wants to write a script that wget's each revision and counts the number of <br /> tags that might be more accurate, but here's 500 revisions worth of data as a chart:</p>

<p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/XlWql.png" alt="Byte count of trade wiki page over time"></p>

<p>500 revisions goes back to Jul 8, 2011.</p>

<p>Also of interest, the <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Trade&amp;oldid=3376" rel="nofollow noreferrer">earliest revision</a> (Feb 10, 2011) of the Trade page has a scant 117 <code>&lt;li&gt;</code> tags while the current page has a whopping 785! I haven't taken the time to count all the revisions inbetween but that's quite a lot of growth - 668 new entries in 225 days for an average of almost 3 entries per day or about 1,084 per year! While some of these are bound to be non-merchant list items, that's still an impressive rate of growth.</p>
