Some Internet Archive employees to receive some of their pay in Bitcoin in April | Hacker News Reader

Some Internet Archive employees to receive some of their pay in Bitcoin in April

blog.archive.org

60 pointspemulis34 comments

I found the title of this post to be misleading or at least stressing its point. The article says

"Some Internet Archive employees have elected to receive some of their pay in Bitcoin in April."

so it's not all employees, not all of their pay and not all of the time, as I expected from the headline.

I totally agree. This should really be changed.

Giving employees the option to take pay in bitcoins is a completely different issue to mandating it, as the title seems to imply.

And then when the title is changed, we give admins hell for changing titles. But you're right.

Thanks for clarifying this. I agree. I went into the article thinking it would be a compulsory change to bitcoin, not one employees could choose. That changes it to being somewhat cutting edge instead of tyrannical.

Slightly OT: Why would you ever put a QR code on a web page instead of a link?

If I'm on my computer, I'm not going to pull out my phone to scan it. If I'm on my phone, how would I even scan it?

In general, I completely agree (though I have never seen it happen before). This is not a link, however, but a bitcoin address encoded as a QR code.

I - as do many others - have a Bitcoin wallet application with some change on my phone. Having the QR code here makes it easier to contribute something.

Bitcoin addresses can be URIs: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/URI_Scheme

Here's a very funny rant about the overuse of QR codes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2rVYvylvZc

Its for times when you want to open a link on your phone when you are reading it on the computer. Like the Chrome to phone chrome extension.

I'd prefer to be payed in candy, at least I could eat the candy.

Interesting to know how the tax on these bitcoins would work. Would this count as a taxable perk? If so, would that count as the government counting their existence and value?

I can't talk for the IA, but in the UK the situation is absolutely yes, they would be taxed. Any payment of any kind, or any benefit in kind, is taxable (and the tax paid in cash, not bitcoins!), apart from a few specified exemptions.

they would be taxable, how they would be taxed though is an entirely differnt question. Would they be considered the same as being paid you usual wages and therefore taxed as income? Or taxed like gold, i.e.not taxed until you sell? or perhaps like a stock, a capital gains tax is charged so you pay for any gain they have made since you reeived them? Willing to bet that HMRC has not even considerd it yet.

In the US, if you are paid in gold, it's still taxed as income. Then you are taxed when you sell the gold on capital gains on the difference between the market value when you received it and when you sold it. There's no loophole that allows avoiding paying income tax just because you are paid differently.

I imagine they would be taxed the same as any American paid wages in a non-US currency (i.e. Americans working overseas). This wouldn't be a groundbreaking situation.

I think the taxes would be fairly easy to figure out, no different than if you paid in gold or beanie babies or Euros. It doesn't really give bitcoins any special status or legitimacy for the IRS to do this.

Yay no taxes, the end of civilization.

They'll still have to pay taxes. The same way that if they paid them in computer parts they'd have to pay taxes on the value of those.

A very US view of things, many people are happy to pay taxes as they understand that they derive a benefit from doing so. The US has such an anti-tax stance that you just assume people would avoid paying taxes if it was easy to do so.

There is diversity in opinion on taxes in the US. There are also inane "debates" where people try to make their opponents' political opinions on taxes seem ridiculously outlandish and extremist, not infrequently for political gain.

In recent political events, US spending got hiked about 50% from ~$2T to ~$3T a year (with modest growth associated with inflation and a growing population). Initially this was under the Bush administration and the auspices of bailouts and the like, but the Obama administration has made these increases part of the permanent baseline. The conflict here is whether to hike tax revenues 50% as well, or cut the budget back towards where it was in 2007 or so. Perhaps more Americans would support proposed additional taxes if they thought the additional government spending over the past several years had materially impacted their lives in a positive manner? Economic decisions are made on the margin, after all; it's a question of more taxes or fewer, and not like anyone's seriously calling to disband the fire department (of course, the hype says differently).

(Any spending related to Obamacare once it goes into effect is not even addressed in these figures, so it would be additional.)

More imminently, there is a lot of hype about how a catastrophic "sequester" would end up shutting down the federal government and ending meat inspections and starving social security recipients (Democrat hype) or shutting down the military and starving all our veterans (Republican hype) -- however, even with the automatic sequester, the federal government budget would be larger in 2013 than in 2012; it's only a cut relative to the growth that was previously baked into certain budget assumptions.

Other fun bits: In December the Republicans proposed tax reform which would have raised revenue by keeping rates low but limiting deductions. The Democrats didn't like the plan, they got their way, and ultimately there were tax hikes instead. Besides not fitting with the headline programme of "let's tax the rich!!" a salient reason that the Democrats didn't like this plan is that state income taxes in a lot of high-tax states electing lots of Democrats are also a major source of income-tax deductions. That bit didn't get a lot of press.

(Oh, and the campaign promise that's still on Barack Obama's website? $2.50 in spending cuts for every $1 in new taxes, to close the deficit? Yeah, the White House has proposed budgets and they don't look anything like spending cuts.)

To close the loop with celticninja:

1. For a given desired government outcome there exists some optimal taxation level. (This is a function, f(desired_outcome) = optimal_level, not a constant; I'm not assuming a particular desired outcome here.)

2. Unless you think the desired taxation level is 100%, it is possible to tax more than the optimal.

3. Even given optimal taxation it is still possible to obtain a suboptimal result.

Given the sheer staggering size of US government intake, and particularly the growth of the intake in the past decade with very little apparent growth in government services to show for it (bear in mind the sharp growth began under Bush and predates the financial crisis), it is hardly irrational that some people might think that we are currently experiencing either or both of a tax intake greater than the optimal or results not commensurate with the taxes taken in by the government, in which either case the logical conclusion is to not simply blindly increase taxes, either taking us further from the optimal tax base or feeding an inefficient system yet more money to spend suboptimally.

The per capita spend of the US government in 2013 is going to be ~$12,000 on a per capita debt of ~$55,000[1]. The per capita spend of, say, France, was on an income of 1.55 trillion Euro [2] and a population of 65.5 million, about 2300 Euro per capita, about $3000ish. It's not exactly unfair to wonder what we're getting for that much more money.

[1]: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_per_capita_spending.h...

[2]: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/france/government-spending , though you'll have to fiddle with it a bit

[3]: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#...

Seeing as the Internet Archive operates out of the US and their employees may likely be US-based, I don't think the humor is unwarranted.

I assure you, that if you were paid in goats[1], the IRS would find a way to tax you. Taxing your pay based on bitcoins will not be a problem.

1) http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

Or the beginning of a new one based on volunteerism and non-aggression.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

Does non-aggression principle mean, that society can't have any enforceable rules, like taxes? If so, NAP is not a good idea.

There will be enforceable rules against any type of aggression. Coercion of private property would be considered immoral and an act of violence.

So social programs would be voluntary. ala non-profit organizations such as Kiva that utilize technology, the internet and volunteerism (instead of highly bureaucratic systems with no quality control) to affect social change.

Of course this is all an extremely radical thought experiment. But it seems to be the coming side-effect of technology.

This almost certainly won't work for many reasons:

1. People would donate radically less money than they pay via taxes today. That would result in even higher inequality.

2. Rich people would be more powerful, because for example, they would be able to make their own army (tanks, nuclear weapons, etc.).

3. No regulation of private sector (banks, food companies, ...) is not good for the society as a whole.

4. Etc.

Mhm the usual markets don't work arguments... lets apply the same points to the current corporatist system:

1) We have the highest inequality in recent history... while still having the high tax expenditure in recent history

2) Rich people and large corporations hold massive power while lacking the stabilizing reduction in wealth via competition thanks to government protectionism

3) Hows that regulation working out for banks, pharma companies and food companies?

[1] see bank bailouts and moral hazards of last 4 yrs. Almost all big banks are still in business.

[2] this happens yearly, small government lawsuit settlements then business as usual: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_... + The FDA helped keep the same 8 pharma companies in business since the 1800s by making competition impossible.

[3] FDA is becoming less relevant thanks to information availability.

It's possible to have food safety done via organizations/associations... so you buy food brands based on the fact it's been verified by x food safety board.

Markets work quite well but markets without any rules are often not optimal.

1) Percentage of GDP in social expenditures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Social-expenditures-2001-O... . This correlates with inequality.

2) Corporations in countries like France, Germany, Canada etc. have less relative power than in the US.

3) I don't know, I don't live in the US. But zero regulation of these industries is without question not the best amount of regulation.

As for the last sentence – I think it should be illegal to sell food that causes serious problems.

> 2) Corporations in countries like France, Germany, Canada etc. have less relative power than in the US.

I live in Canada. The 4 banks and 2 telecom companies here have total domination of the market and our gov agencies prevent competition openly. Much more than the US.

We've been fortunate that they've been conservative for the last few decades but they are increasingly becoming americanized and our corporatist government wants badly to be like America.

I agree laissez faire markets aren't optimal. But I'm also 100% sure government run markets is significantly worse. I only support the elimination of massive governments in favor or smaller communities with their own economic freedom (social or capitalist) similar to Hong Kong city-states.

ala Startups vs mega-corporations.

What responsibilities shoud different levels (city, territory, country) have, is a complicated question... but I definitely agree that probably every governement is far from being simple and effecient.

"Internet Archive Employees to be Paid in Bitcoins"

It's all fun and games until you work 4-5 years, and maybe you can get a couple of pizzas with your savings. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0

Does the time flow back for you?

those that forget history...

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