Hacker News Reader

Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

It would be rad to be able to pay in Bitcoin as the employer. Any thoughts there? It would help your model as you'd get to save trade fees by having an internal trading desk essentially.

View on HN

Hey! Cody from Incoin here. It would be rad and it's in our roadmap. Employers currently do fund payroll in USD, but we're working on adding the ability to fund payroll in BTC. And you're absolutely correct. We would save in fees in a number of places, namely avoiding using our ACH provider.

Wouldn't it be an accounting nightmare for both employer and employee to pay with property instead of currency? I think the IRS declared that Bitcoin is property.

You're absolutely correct. It will be difficult for them. It will be even more difficult depending if they've just purchased the coin or have held it for a while.

At some point the IRS may have to change their tune. The tax code is malleable even though it does require Herculean effort to change. Cryptocurrency and more generalized blockchain platforms such as ethereum could provide leverage to change minds if they could begin to demonstrate their value on the fraud prevention front to regulatory agencies. I work at a nonprofit startup focused on creating systems for pooling and streamlining the administrative overhead for nonprofits, and we consistently find that the regulatory obstacle course nonprofits are faced with is related to a fundamental problem of trust created by a few bad actors. A "triple entry" linked accounting platform built on the blockchain as described at https://medium.com/the-block-chain/creating-the-everything-l... could radically alter the nonprofit sector by making fraud much harder to do, though getting a critical mass to adopt it would be challenging. Not to mention the underlying engineering challenge.

Amazing answer and awesome link. That would be a massive boon. What startup do you work for?

The company is called ArtsPool (http://artspool.co). I use the term startup rather loosely, though. We have modeled ourselves on startups because we admire how startups operate and want to inspire nonprofits to learn from some of the efficiencies in other sectors, but our goal is not to make a profit. We are organized as a member-owned LLC where any surpluses from cost savings return to the members, so essentially we are a more like a co-op designed to separate certain administrative concerns from mission-related activities.

I get what you mean.

Impressive. What kind of tools do you guys have in the works? How is the compliance toolkit working out?

The compliance toolkit is going well though as I'm sure you know from working on payroll, it isn't easy to get users to embrace something related to an area that they usually associate with pain (even if it reduces that pain). For now it's just focused on New York but we plan to open source it for other states later in the year. We are also looking at some of the trouble spots in accounting and payroll such as automating the allocation of expenses/payroll across programs and projects, which is essential for nonprofits but time consuming and error prone. I'd be interested to see you expand your idea of allocation-based payroll to the employer side as well. No one does this but every nonprofit needs it.

That's interesting. You'd be interested in seeing employers receive payment from customers that's allocated/split? Or can you expand on that a bit? Feel free to email me at cody [at] incoin.io if you'd like to discuss more.

Well, if you're compliant in the US right now, you are keeping track of the value of every coin anyway. My own experience is that not many companies are doing this -- at CoinLab it was a very large effort, and included head-scratching conversations with accountants as to whether or not specific identification vs FIFO/LIFO was most appropriate.

So, yes, pain in the ass, however, one that you incur whenever you spend coins if you're compliant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com