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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

No I think it means you can force someone to take the currency for payment. If I don't want to take bitcoins for payment, no one is going to force me.

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Is it illegal for a seller to price something in the U.S. in bitcoin (or a some other form of exchange) and not dollars?

If cigarettes became a more attractive medium of exchange, is it illegal to use that medium between two private, consenting parties?

You can price anything in anything, nobody prohibits you for exchanging a dining table for a sonnet or a Python script for a set of numbers. Legal tender means if you wanted money, and somebody pays you in US currency, you can not force them to pay in something else. Moreover, if you did agree to write a sonnet as payment, and did not do, and you get sued, and assigned damages - you can pay these damages in US currency and it would be deemed settled. I.e. any debt that is paid in US currency would be considered settled. You can still pay in whatever you like, as long as both parties agree.

I believe that's the very definition of legal tender:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender

It doesn't prevent you from accepting other means of exchange (though in some countries it does), but it does force you to accept it, even if you don't like it.

Not quite, legal tender means if someone owes you money, you have to accept it.

Not if you're the US government, apparently?

Tim DeChristopher spent 21 months in prison despite how he "had raised sufficient funds for an initial payment to the BLM (which the BLM refused to accept)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_DeChristopher#Trial

(I bring this up because I'd always wondered about how why that case fell out that way, and apparently it can't, per the common meaning of the terms, so my understanding of legal tender seems correct?)

If you'd said toilet paper (or most other things) instead of cigarettes, I think you'd have a different conversation, but as cigarettes are a restricted and specially taxed thing, I suspect that using individual cigarettes as bartering implements is almost certainly taboo.

Fiat, while in a way better shape on that part, is not perfect either. I don't know for other countries, but here in france we have three means of payment : payment cards, paychecks and cash. Cash is annoying to manage because of its fixed values, always having to deal with rest and counting. Paychecks, you never know if a merchant will accept them (it's more and more rare). payment cards have weekly rate limits, and we have no mean to know before paying for something how close you are from it, except if you track every single payment you make.

Last year, I tried a bitcoin payment card. It was not practical because of bitcoin volatility, but there was something super cool about it : it was a prepaid rechargeable card that I could recharge in the hour, by sending bitcoins to it. I always knew how much I could use on the card and could basically use everything that was on it, without fearing to hit some obscure limit.

This was the perfect payment method for me. I hope we'll have something similar to this but with non volatile currency soon (I know this exists for fiat, but I have to wait like 2 days for a wire transfer to happen, this is not practical).

The problems you are describing have nothing to do with Fiat currency but with the quality of the service offered by your bank. My bank shows me all pending payments live.

Certainly, it's a banking problem. My problem was not to list pending transactions, though, it was not knowing how much I could use at any given moment with my card (because it's unrelated to my balance). The cryptocurrency part was to allow for fast reload (due to fast transfers), but anything that allows this (without hitting an other card rate limit, obviously) would do.

Like a prepaid Visa or Mastercard?

Yep, it was a prepaid visa, the "feature" of it was that I could recharge it in an hour or less (the time a bitcoin transaction was confirmed).

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