[tyre]

This is not different.

Coincidentally, I was the engineer at Zenpayroll (now Gusto) who was working on enabling employees to be paid in crypto back in 2013/2014. We never got to the implementation phase because of precisely this scenario. Bitcoin is so volatile that it's a very scary way to be paid. The downside risk (you can't pay rent because bitcoin did something weird that week) is really really bad for users and most people don't understand those or the tax implications. So we scrapped the feature.[0]

A parallel would be stock options issued by companies. Let's say you get 100 stock options with a strike price of $1/per share. You wait a year to exercise and by that point the common stock is valued at $2.50 per share. If you exercise, you still pay $100 for the 100 shares but you owe taxes on the $150 gain, even though you might think that your compensation was always $100.

If you acquire an asset at one price and sell it at another, you owe taxes on the difference. If you acquire an asset for less than it's worth, you owe taxes on that.

[0]: this is one reason why I will never understand people defending btc as "a store of value". That's a terrible store of value!

[opportune]

What about setting up partial compensation on a sliding scale? If my rent+bills+other fixed expenses is X% of my income, I could just take as much as cash as will pay for that and take out the rest of the 1-X% in crypto

That said, unless there are tax implications of paying/getting paid in BTC that cause you to e.g. not realize gains, it's really no different than just paying the employee in all cash and letting them purchase as much crypto as they want with it.

[tyre]

Not a bad idea.

There were other issues as well that contributed to the decision, namely:

- Legality: there are specific regulations around how employees can be paid. These stem, historically, from companies paying employees in coupons only redeemable at other company stores (think: railroad workers paid in coupons for the general store owned by the railroad.

- Reversibility: What happens if the payroll needs to be reversed? With bitcoin you can't. This is important for cases of fraud (e.g. stolen credentials), user error (e.g. mistyping hours worked), or bugs on our end.

- Anti-money laundering: We needed to be reasonably sure you weren't laundering money. In case you were, having a bank account makes tracing the money much easier. Coin tumblers and the like make obfuscation and cleaning dirty money trivial.

- User adoption and education: How many people really want this feature versus others in the pipeline? If we ship it, what load does this put on our support team to handle calls about bitcoin? About losing their private key?

These are a subset. There are many concerns. I hear you about employees taking that money and buying it anyway, but we did have additional concerns to think about. We weren't against crypto, but it wasn't a good fit for our platform, userbase, size, priorities, etc.

[bduerst]

How is this different from just converting 1-x% of your pay schedule into bitcoins yourself?

I'm not sure the option to be paid in numerous currencies concurrently is a big feature for payroll.