Salaries paid in Bitcoin a growing trend in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Salaries paid in Bitcoin a growing trend in Canada

cbc.ca

32 pointsfraqed26 comments

I wonder who's manning this submarine [1].

[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Not necessarily. Bitcoin makes useful click bait.

Are the salaries set in bitcoin? Or Canadian Dollars and then exchanged for bitcoin on payday at market rates?

Either way, It seems I'd rather be paid in dollars for the stability then have the ability to trade these for bitcoin with dips in the market. Unless my salary is set in bitcoin and I'm counting on Bitcoin inflation to outpace dollar inflation.

I've never once purchased a Bitcoin and it will probably be quite a while before I consider ever purchasing Bitcoins, but it seems to me the Bitcoin craze has settled down and it's value has somewhat stabilized (for now) making this sort of thing "possible", though I'm still surprised it's even happening. This I believe will be a fad that will be phased out once people start requesting their wages paid in euros, pounds, or other forms of legitimate worldwide currency, using this as precedent. I don't particularly agree with the offering, but it's neat to read about at least.

You don't get it.

People do want to get paid in Bitcoin, because it's easy to deal with it. It's easy to send and receive payments, they can't be frozen, you don't need to call your bank to authorize a large payment, etc.

Euros, pounds, etc don't solve the problems that attract Bitcoin users.

Not to mention nobody accepts euros and pounds in the US, so there's no real point in getting paid in them, but Bitcoins get more and more widespread every day.

Also I don't care if Bitcoin price is going down at the moment, I still want to get paid in Bitcoin. Unfortunately the people I bill don't have that option.

>you don't need to call your bank to authorize a large payment

Also known as fraud prevention.

Bitcoin has security controls, it's not magically exclusive to the banks.

Multisig, paper wallets, multiple wallets, insured storage, etc.

> Unfortunately the people I bill don't have that option.

Well, that's ok, you get paid in your local currency and then you go buy more bitcoins!

As for paying with euros and pounds in the US, that mostly applies to cash transactions. I'm having about a 100% success rate paying in Euros when I buy stuff from/in the US and Canada using credit cards tied to European bank accounts. All the exchanges happen fully automatic at some (relatively transparent) percentage, not unlike the fee a bitcoin exchange takes (assuming you get your money back at all...).

Not too surprising, during my life the Canadian dollar has drifted between 0.65 USD and 1.07 USD, and prices for certain goods like books and electronics barely ever keep up.

Bitcoin may currently be a lot more volatile, but the CAD isn't that great either.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

During my lifetime bitcoin went from being worth fractions of cents to more than $1000 and back down again to $400 or so. The $CAD may not be the most stable currency in the world - when compared to the US$ - but bitcoin is doing a lot worse, orders of magnitude worse.

If you compared the Canadian dollar to other currencies than the US$ then it starts to look a lot better, bitcoin on the other hand still looks far worse.

It's not doing worse. It's doing orders of magnitude better unless you bought in at the last peak.

Not many bitcoin owners will complain that bitcoin went up 10% or 1000% or 100000%.

A cube earth may be an imprecise model, but a perfectly spherical model isn't that accurate either.

lol, you get your salary, the next day, down 4 percent...

or 30 up

If you get paid in USD, it's guaranteed to slowly lose value. Unlike Bitcoin.

I'll bank on the stability of the USD backed by the US government over Bitcoin anytime.

It sure is stable, at losing value:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mAg6FMpNGpM/Ta9ICcEMonI/AAAAAAAABB...

And the best part is I know roughly how much of my income I'm going to part ways with tomorrow and next month when I want to buy a gallon of gas, grocery items, or a car. That graph really has no bearing on day to day swings of the USD vs. the insane volatility of bitcoin that seems to get glossed over by all of its rabid proponents.

It goes up more than it goes down so far. Long term it doesn't matter.

What rabid opponents don't understand is that volatility will subside with the adoption.

I think the "slowly" is the important bit here. BTC lost as much value against the US dollar over the last month as the US dollar's loss in purchasing power since 2005, and the US had the worst economic crisis in half a century and an awful lot of QE over that time period.

Of course, the dollar also didn't gain value in a wild speculative gold rush in 2013, but there's something to be said for stability in the means of payment.

could it be because of the large Chinese population?

I get paid my living in Bitcoin. I'm not Chinese.

Where do you live and how do you pay your rent? Also in bitcoin?

I live in Ontario. I pay for my condo via direct debit from my chequing account like everyone else.

why?

Because my company accepts Bitcoin for their services. They pay me with that Bitcoin. It's up to me to exchange it for cash (if I need it) or pay for my things directly in Bitcoin if possible.

It's not difficult. There was a time when people would ask "What can you buy with Bitcoin?" Today it's the opposite question. "What CAN'T you buy with Bitcoin?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com