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by liricooli 4380 days ago
In finance, being subject to holding a currency you don't want to hold and prefer to change, is called Foreign Exchange Risk [1].

Why would a reasonable person want that ? Even If I believe in Bitcoin, I'd prefer getting paid in USD and choose to invest in Bitcoin.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_risk
2 comments
codelitt 4380 days ago
We're using this internally right now, and that's a risk we wanted to mitigate for ourselves. Pretty sure that no-one wants to assume this risk.

The companies that use our service don't own or transact in Bitcoin. Wages are specified and debited in USD — we then purchase Bitcoin and transfer it to the employees. This effectively mitigates any risk from the companies.

For employees our main feature right now is that they can manage how much they want in Bitcoin/USD — every month — and manage the risks themselves. Also, one of our employees requested an "average bitcoin price", which helps to mitigate any risk on the employees side (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916822)

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liricooli 4380 days ago
I see. Than I still don't understand what you\ your employers benefit from paying in Bitcoin ?

Unless your USD-->Bitcoin (and the other way round) transaction costs are lower than the average joe's, why would I prefer being paid that why ? Even if you cover the transaction costs I'd still prefer to be paid in USD and that you'd pay me the additional transaction costs instead of converting USD to bitcoin on my behalf.

Unless it's a finance backdoor in terms of tax, etc, I can't see the reason in doing it.

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liricooli 4380 days ago
I still can't get why is this a good idea.

As a finance tech worker, I know that All Import/Export companies are so afraid of the forex risk that they are willing to pay someone to take care of the risk. Usually they either buy options or forwards to fix the exchange rate ahead of time.

So unless your base currency is BTC all the way, I still can't understand why anyone would do it.

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josu 4380 days ago
If you don't live in the same country in whihch your company is based they still need a way to wire you the money. The average international transfer fee is around 8% [1]. So the 4% or so fee from Bitstamp doesn't seem that bad. You probably still need a way to convert it back to fiat, but still...

[1] https://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en Sorry, the data is somewhere around there, but I can't point to the specificdocument right now.

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