Salaries paid in Bitcoin a growing trend in Canada

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/salaries-paid-in-bitcoin-a-growing-trend-in-canada-1.2752441

by fraqed • 12 years ago

32 26 12 years ago

cbc.ca

freakonom• 12 years ago

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

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

blazespin• 12 years ago

Not necessarily. Bitcoin makes useful click bait.

mikeryan• 12 years ago

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.

ryanseys• 12 years ago

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.

imaginenore6• 12 years ago

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.

MichaelGG2• 12 years ago

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

Also known as fraud prevention.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

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...).

tiku• 12 years ago

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

mateuszf• 12 years ago

or 30 up

imaginenore6• 12 years ago

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

res0nat0r2• 12 years ago

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

notahacker• 12 years ago

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.

dongcoin• 12 years ago

could it be because of the large Chinese population?

tigereyeTO3• 12 years ago

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

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

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

guiomie• 12 years ago

why?

CoolGuySteve• 12 years ago

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&...

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

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.

imaginenore6• 12 years ago

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%.

MichaelGG2• 12 years ago

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

Salaries paid in Bitcoin a growing trend in Canada

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