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Finnish HTML5 house SC5 pays salary and accepts payments as Bitcoins
- DoubleCluster 14y agoGood PR, but why would anyone want to get part of their salary paid in bitcoins? You get the disadvantages of both.
- piokoch 14y agoUnless you don't need to pay taxes if you get your salary in bitcoins :)
- arethuza 14y agoIf all it took to avoid income tax was to be paid in a different currency then I would assume someone would have noticed that by now. Personally, I find tax returns are bad enough without including multiple currencies! :-)
- lukifer 14y agoAFAIK, it's ambiguous if governments consider BitCoin to be currency. I thought that's why BTC theft is problematic: as far as the law is concerned, nothing of value was taken, and at best you'd have to prosecute under hacking laws, not theft. (I'm a BitCoin noob, tell me if I'm wrong.) :)
- jerguismi 14y agoAutomatic dollar-averaged investment done by the company. I would like that service if I were a regular worker.
- brittohalloran 14y agoIn the most volatile stock ever
- jerguismi 14y agoAnd the best-performing asset for the last 2-3 years or so? Also pretty natural for high-tech IT company to allow this kind of thing.
- betterunix 14y agoPast performance is not an indication of future performance.
- jerguismi 14y agoI didn't say so.
- danielbarla 14y agoWouldn't it be more accurate to call it a commodity? Stocks are (usually) stakes in a company, whose employees are actively trying to make a profit for the shareholders, whereas currencies just kind of... sit there (and move around, more or less randomly, at least, non-predictably).
- smrtinsert 14y agoi believe currencies are traded in the form of FOREX futures, which are contracts that must be settled on a date sometime from now. they are not mediated by an exchange like NASDAQ if memory serves, its just one big crazy open market. i would say bitcoin trading belongs in the category of DIGEX then, a digital currency exchange.
- ISL 14y agoGood luck doing your taxes! Seriously. Is there any simple guidance on how to figure your income if paid in BTC?
- iwwr 14y agoThey're still paid in EUR, just getting some of that converted to BTC. If selling the BTC later on makes them a profit, it becomes the responsibility of the employee to report any profits. The greater problem is how the employer manages to get a hold of larger amounts of BTC needed.
- jerguismi 14y ago> The greater problem is how the employer manages to get a hold of larger amounts of BTC needed. They are using external service for that AFAIK. The company itself does not manage the bitcoin purchases.
- paavo 14y agoThat's true. They're using the Finnish exchanger (Bittiraha) which also provides payment services for world's first Bitcoin-accepting dental clinic (MeidänKlinikka) as well as Finland's first Bitcoin-accepting restaurant (Vegemesta).
- Cthulhu_ 14y ago> The greater problem is how the employer manages to get a hold of larger amounts of BTC needed. If I were the employer, I'd be wringing my hands; for all I know they could've gotten a small fortune in BTC when they were still cheap to generate / purchase, and since then the value of BTC has sixtupled (or more). So, pay their employees without having to spend real money. I'm probably not understanding BTC though.
- hatu 14y agoI'm not sure how the taxes work but wouldn't it be kind of like buying shares as a company that made good profits. It's not free money in the eyes of the tax office.
- Yver 14y agoThat seems about as notable as being paid in Turkish lira or in watermelons. Anyone can take their salary in local currency and exchange it for something else. There's little incentive to lock part of your salary in a foreign(?) currency when they "use the daily exchange rate of the payday."
- alvaromuir 14y agoNow.. if only my landlord, baby mama and weed dealer would follow suit....
- betterunix 14y ago"Based on cryptography, it is secure and deterministic as we require for digital services." This is a bad understanding of cryptography. Bitcoin does not provide security in the cryptographic sense, any more than Skype or Hushmail. It uses secure cryptographic primitives but can be successfully attacked (double-spent) in polynomial time.
- jerguismi 14y ago> It uses secure cryptographic primitives but can be successfully attacked (double-spent) in polynomial time. Does that kind of sentence promote better understanding how cryptography or bitcoin works for the average Joe?
- betterunix 14y agoNo, perhaps it would be better phrased as this: Bitcoin does not meet the minimum standard of security required by modern cryptography despite being built on systems that do meet such a standard. Even that phrasing is suboptimal, though, since the definition of "security" for a hash function is different from the definition for a signature system and both are different from the definition used for digital cash.
- johnward 14y agoSo is this like company script? I mean I wouldn't want to be paid in BTC unless it was widely accepted.
- fosfori 14y agoI understood that if you want, you can ask to be paid a part of your salary in BTC. If I was to work for them, I would definitely ask them to automatically pay me like 1% of my salary in BTC each month. Why? Because I could.