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Comment by lukasm | Hacker News Reader

I'd refuse the job offer if the company would pay me in bitcoin. Volatility is not acceptable.

Having said that, there is a market for companies that hire remote workers and they could use it for automating the process of exchanging, accounting fiat1 -> BTC -> fiat2

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There's nothing stopping you from converting the BTC to fiat the moment you get paid, or for a service to automatically do this like BTC merchant services (no idea if this service does it).

For merchants Bitpay guarantees that you'll get the exact fiat value transferred to your bank account that the item was originally priced at.

I wouldn't want my salary to be measured in BTC. If you got hired in December, when the price was $900/BTC, at say 1000 BTC pa salary (so $90k pa), these days you would be on a $60k salary.

i think you mean 100 BTC

Nobody uses BTC like this for anything (pay or purchase). At the time of payment you would convert your fiat value into BTC and make your payment, the other side is free to keep the BTC to convert it instantly into their local fiat.

I see this argument a lot. The issue I have with this is that you are merely trading the headaches of international wire transfer with the headache of converting BTC<->fiat. Basically, instead of dealing with a bank, you're dealing with Coinbase.

No, this service would useful if I can get paid in Bitcoin, and pay for a majority of my expenses in Bitcoin, without having to convert to fiat at any point. Unfortunately, the Bitcoin ecosystem is nowhere near this sophisticated yet.

I suppose that would be true if exchanging BTC to local fiat was a "headache" for me. In my country and with my experience it hasn't been a headache at all between the local exchanges I can walk up in person or online.

Dealing with banks is less of a headache for me than dealing with a Bitcoin exchange.

Have you ever tried to pay someone in another country?

I understood the parent post to be saying that they wouldn't feel comfortable with a wage negotiated in bitcoins. 2 BTC/week means $1200 today, but next pay period, maybe it'll be $500, or maybe $5000. That kind of volatility persists regardless of whether you convert it immediately.

If the wage were negotiated in USD, but paid in Bitcoin, that'd be much more usable.

Wouldn't want to be paid in BTC either, also because of the volatility.

I do think it would be a nice thing for speculative side jobs, though: The extra income gets stashed away automatically, and I would only look again at it a few years later :)

Sure, if you are /actually/ paid using bitcoin. I think what is being suggested is bitcoin is really used as an interim currency, or transfer protocol - to avoid the cost and time of current international banking processes.

Therefore, you would still be paid in a real currency, and the underlying number of bitcoins used in the transfer is not relevant.

However, this product seems to be suggesting paid it bitcoins - which I would also not be able to accept. :)

The existing banking system, for all its warts, is a proven, secure system for exchanging fiat1 -> fiat2. Bitcoin's use case has to be a lot stronger than merely being a substitute for TTs.

If you're willing to deal with delays and exchange rate fees, sure.

You mean with Bitcoin?

Bitcoin transactions won't be free forever.

The incentive for me to verify your Bitcoin transactions using my electricity and my processor cycles, is that I might get a free Bitcoin in return. This is the basis of Bitcoin mining, and it's a rather elegant solution in my opinion.

However, once this supply of mined Bitcoin slows down, where's the incentive for me to continue processing transactions? That's right, transaction fees. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

Transfers of a certain size were never free, the fee however is tiny (0.0001 BTC) and doesn't compare to transfer fees or other international money transfer service fees.

Don't forget that there is a cap on the number of transactions that the blockchain can process in a given amount of time (IIRC it's like 7 transactions per second). That's what we call a scarce resource, which will eventually lead to rent-seeking. I guarantee there will be payment processors that spring up as a result of being able to guarantee priority on your transactions because they have agreements with multiple large bitcoin mining pools. I'm also willing to bet that this fee settles out close to the transfer fee for existing international money transfer services.

>Don't forget that there is a cap on the number of transactions that the blockchain can process in a given amount of time (IIRC it's like 7 transactions per second).

7 transactions per second is an arbitrary limit that was imposed to keep things manageable, because Bitcoin is a beta, an experimental system. Transaction fees may rise for the reasons you've described, but referencing the '7 TPS cap' as if it is a real limit makes the situation look far worse than it is.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

Of course there will be transaction fees if Bitcoin sticks around long enough. There are already optional but de facto transaction fees for certain types of transactions. I'm pretty sure those fees are still significantly cheaper than doing equivalent transactions through the traditional banking system.

We must define secure differently.

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