No one wants to pay you for legal above-board work in bitcoin[0] because bitcoin is not a useful currency (for reasons that have been rehashed plenty of times in HN comments.
Nonsense. I have been getting paid in BTC or (when BTC fees ramp up temporarily) in other coins like Ethereum and XRP for years for completely legal, non-criminal, not even grey work and know of many jobs, job forums and other compensation sources that happily pay in crypto for perfectly legal work, either by default or if you request it as your method of payment. You basically just invented a fact and casually stated it as if true.
I also should note that for work done for clients outside my country of residence, I preferred crypto payments because local exchanges allowed me to have the payment in my bank account, in local currency in minutes 24 hours a day, any day of the week, as opposed to waiting 24 hours or even days by any other non-crypto payment method
If your customer is willing to spend BTC they own for your services, and you’re willing to exchange your services for some amount of BTC — then it’s very straightforward, zero extra hoops to jump.
Imagine now your customer is in a non-US country, and you are in another non-US country with another currency. Using USD wire transfer is jumping through hoops in this context, and might not always be fast, cheap, or possible at all with some pairs of countries.
> If your customer is willing to spend BTC they own for your services[..]
In this scenario, would one's rate be set in BTC, or fiat?
I'm struggling to understand how a (non-crypto) business could want to hire a contractor at - let's say - 0.016 BTC/day, then watch the real (fiat) cost of that rate change value as the crypto markets move.
"We hired a contractor at what was $100/day but right now it's costing us $1000/day because we agreed to fix her rate in BTC" ?
Isn't this essentially like agreeing to pay someone in gold, or any other random commodity?
> In this scenario, would one's rate be set in BTC, or fiat?
You set the rate in USD, and do the currency conversion upon sending.
> I'm struggling to understand how a (non-crypto) business could want to hire a contractor at - let's say - 0.016 BTC/day
You’re right, BTC is too volatile to set the price in it in advance. But it is a perfectly good payment method.
It’s true that if you need the money you receive in BTC to feed your family tomorrow or they starve, then BTC is not convenient and too risky due to price fluctuations. But if you’re a reasonably compensated professional or a business with healthy margins, there’s very little downside in receiving 10—20% of money as crypto, and potentially very high upside.
It would be foolish for a business to enter into BTC-denominated contracts because that would expose them to a huge foreign exchange risk in return for nothing.
This doesn't really address the comment it replies to though. Paying someone for work in a dollar stablecoin still obviates their need for a crypto onramp.
1) Not everyone has a job where they can be paid in crypto. 2) Some people want to invest larger amounts into crypto. Both these cases require an onramp.
and yet, almost nobody does this. Because it's impractical so far. I would look forward to the day when it does become practical, but i cannot see when that may be.
It’s not that unfathomable, it’s just not something you’re about to get in place of a direct deposit any time soon. I’ve seen internet artists and musicians offer to take commission payment in crypto before. Assuming the ecological issues of cryptocurrencies are possible to sort out, this kind of peer-to-peer usage feels nearly ideal, especially when many smaller businesses have trust issues with internet peer to peer payment providers such as PayPal.
There's already an entire industry growing up around enabling cryptocurrencies to be spent using traditional payment rails too, though, for those who don't want to see their governments print away the value of their money.
Coinbase itself has a debit card that deducts directly from your crypto balance and allows you to swipe the card anywhere that normally takes Visa. They're even a card issuer for Visa in their own right, so they don't have to do it through partner banks.[0]
Spending crypto is easy, whether the vendor opts into using it or not, so if you do get paid in it, it's easy to use.
I think we must be talking past each other or something. The purchasing power of every single fiat currency has trended down since the elimination of hard money standards, so as far as I can tell, every single government is printing away the value of its money.
I don't see how that's "failing to do so" if "so" refers to "printing away the value of their money"?
[0] within margin of error