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Comment by weirdstuff | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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