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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> If your customer is willing to spend BTC they own for your services[..]

In this scenario, would one's rate be set in BTC, or fiat?

I'm struggling to understand how a (non-crypto) business could want to hire a contractor at - let's say - 0.016 BTC/day, then watch the real (fiat) cost of that rate change value as the crypto markets move.

"We hired a contractor at what was $100/day but right now it's costing us $1000/day because we agreed to fix her rate in BTC" ?

Isn't this essentially like agreeing to pay someone in gold, or any other random commodity?

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> In this scenario, would one's rate be set in BTC, or fiat?

You set the rate in USD, and do the currency conversion upon sending.

> I'm struggling to understand how a (non-crypto) business could want to hire a contractor at - let's say - 0.016 BTC/day

You’re right, BTC is too volatile to set the price in it in advance. But it is a perfectly good payment method.

It’s true that if you need the money you receive in BTC to feed your family tomorrow or they starve, then BTC is not convenient and too risky due to price fluctuations. But if you’re a reasonably compensated professional or a business with healthy margins, there’s very little downside in receiving 10—20% of money as crypto, and potentially very high upside.

It would be foolish for a business to enter into BTC-denominated contracts because that would expose them to a huge foreign exchange risk in return for nothing.

So you're saying these people don't want to use BTC? If they used BTC exclusively for everything this wouldn't be an issue. Dollar denominated contracts only matter if all you have is dollars. By that I mean that if you buy 0.01 BTC today and hold them until the contract is completed then you face zero foreign exchange risk.

If you don't possess the BTC on the day you signed the contract then you basically created an option with a zero dollar strike price. You aren't truly using the currency the way helloworld1 and others imply.

If they used BTC exclusively they wouldn't have foreign currency exchange risk. Instead they would have alternating periods of hyperinflation and hyperdeflation, coupled with highly uncertain tax liabilities, because taxes are still paid with real money. So, not much better. And this is assuming that there are no technical limitations or prohibitive costs preventing the adoption of BTC as exclusive currency.

People don't "want" to use credit cards or PayPal, either.

They do so because it gets the job done.

You'll get really tired from all of these gymnastics trying to convince everyone already using cryptocurrency that nobody's using cryptocurrency.

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