Bitcoin is changing. We've realigned the goals of Bitcoin Black Friday with it.

If you watched the news regarding merchants / payment processors this year, there was not a whole lot of development, at least in the United States, for Bitcoin merchants.

I've spent the last three years each Black Friday season attempting to get more merchant sign ups than the last years. It became a bit of a challenge for me, trying to grow year after year. With all the merchant adoption numbers released by payment processors, it definitely seemed possible.

The number of merchants that care enough about Bitcoin, Bitcoiners, and the community to give real deals on Black Friday is not in the thousands. While processors might have supposedly signed up thousands and thousands of merchants so far, few of those merchants are actually integrated into the community.

This year we are not going for numbers. That's why you might have noticed we don't have a sign up form on the website. We were planning on releasing our merchant form, funnily enough, today, or tomorrow. We won't be accepting merchants that just integrated Bitcoin. We won't be accepting merchants without community reviews. We already have contact information for all of the Bitcoin merchants active in the community.

Additionally, my opinions about Bitcoin as a payment vehicle have changed a bit. We are going to be focusing more on the industries that Bitcoiners care about like mining and hardware wallets.

We're focused on finding the best deals for you, from the merchants you already know.

Goals for this year:

• 100 Merchants. (That's smaller this year! We're going to be only accepting quality merchants. After reviewing which sites actually got traffic and sales last year, the 'filler' merchants don't need to be there.)

• Stress tested website. Last year I went with some new developers who had some rather disappointing results. I had to rely on another developer I've done work with before who worked with me through the night to entirely redo the website. This year we're testing all the features under load. There won't be problems.

• Select deals will be revealed to our newsletter before the day itself.

Sign up for the newsletter at http://bitcoinblackfriday.com if you want to get a reminder about the day. Let me know if you have any questions!

TL;DR: Less merchants, better experience, coming November 27th.