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Comment by DoubleCluster | Hacker News Reader

Good PR, but why would anyone want to get part of their salary paid in bitcoins? You get the disadvantages of both.

Automatic dollar-averaged investment done by the company. I would like that service if I were a regular worker.

In the most volatile stock ever

And the best-performing asset for the last 2-3 years or so? Also pretty natural for high-tech IT company to allow this kind of thing.

Past performance is not an indication of future performance.

I didn't say so.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to call it a commodity? Stocks are (usually) stakes in a company, whose employees are actively trying to make a profit for the shareholders, whereas currencies just kind of... sit there (and move around, more or less randomly, at least, non-predictably).

i believe currencies are traded in the form of FOREX futures, which are contracts that must be settled on a date sometime from now. they are not mediated by an exchange like NASDAQ if memory serves, its just one big crazy open market.

i would say bitcoin trading belongs in the category of DIGEX then, a digital currency exchange.

Unless you don't need to pay taxes if you get your salary in bitcoins :)

If all it took to avoid income tax was to be paid in a different currency then I would assume someone would have noticed that by now.

Personally, I find tax returns are bad enough without including multiple currencies! :-)

AFAIK, it's ambiguous if governments consider BitCoin to be currency. I thought that's why BTC theft is problematic: as far as the law is concerned, nothing of value was taken, and at best you'd have to prosecute under hacking laws, not theft.

(I'm a BitCoin noob, tell me if I'm wrong.) :)

I'd be very surprised if that were true. BTC theft is problematic because the thieves don't get caught surely?

In the UK at least it doesn't matter if you are paid in a currency or not (i.e. "payment in kind") - you'll still have to pay tax on it.

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