

Some Internet Archive employees to receive some of their pay in Bitcoin in April - pemulis
http://blog.archive.org/2013/02/21/employees-to-be-paid-in-bitcoin-please-donate/

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larelli
I found the title of this post to be misleading or at least stressing its
point. The article says

"Some Internet Archive employees have elected to receive some of their pay in
Bitcoin in April."

so it's not all employees, not all of their pay and not all of the time, as I
expected from the headline.

~~~
samwilliams
I totally agree. This should really be changed.

Giving employees the option to take pay in bitcoins is a completely different
issue to mandating it, as the title seems to imply.

~~~
lucb1e
And then when the title is changed, we give admins hell for changing titles.
But you're right.

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furyg3
Slightly OT: Why would you ever put a QR code on a web page instead of a link?

If I'm on my computer, I'm not going to pull out my phone to scan it. If I'm
on my phone, how would I even scan it?

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jonasvp
In general, I completely agree (though I have never seen it happen before).
This is not a link, however, but a bitcoin address encoded as a QR code.

I - as do many others - have a Bitcoin wallet application with some change on
my phone. Having the QR code here makes it easier to contribute something.

~~~
dave1010uk
Bitcoin addresses can be URIs: <https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/URI_Scheme>

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islon
I'd prefer to be payed in candy, at least I could eat the candy.

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HyprMusic
Interesting to know how the tax on these bitcoins would work. Would this count
as a taxable perk? If so, would that count as the government counting their
existence and value?

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RobAley
I can't talk for the IA, but in the UK the situation is absolutely yes, they
would be taxed. Any payment of any kind, or any benefit in kind, is taxable
(and the tax paid in cash, not bitcoins!), apart from a few specified
exemptions.

~~~
celticninja
they would be taxable, how they would be taxed though is an entirely differnt
question. Would they be considered the same as being paid you usual wages and
therefore taxed as income? Or taxed like gold, i.e.not taxed until you sell?
or perhaps like a stock, a capital gains tax is charged so you pay for any
gain they have made since you reeived them? Willing to bet that HMRC has not
even considerd it yet.

~~~
travisp
In the US, if you are paid in gold, it's still taxed as income. Then you are
taxed when you sell the gold on capital gains on the difference between the
market value when you received it and when you sold it. There's no loophole
that allows avoiding paying income tax just because you are paid differently.

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tlarkworthy
Yay no taxes, the end of civilization.

~~~
celticninja
A very US view of things, many people are happy to pay taxes as they
understand that they derive a benefit from doing so. The US has such an anti-
tax stance that you just assume people would avoid paying taxes if it was easy
to do so.

~~~
fennecfoxen
There is diversity in opinion on taxes in the US. There are also _inane_
"debates" where people try to make their opponents' political opinions on
taxes seem ridiculously outlandish and extremist, not infrequently for
political gain.

In recent political events, US spending got hiked about 50% from ~$2T to ~$3T
a year (with modest growth associated with inflation and a growing
population). Initially this was under the Bush administration and the auspices
of bailouts and the like, but the Obama administration has made these
increases part of the permanent baseline. The conflict here is whether to hike
tax revenues 50% as well, or cut the budget back towards where it was in 2007
or so. Perhaps more Americans would support proposed additional taxes if they
thought the additional government spending over the past several years had
materially impacted their lives in a positive manner? Economic decisions are
made on the margin, after all; it's a question of more taxes or fewer, and not
like anyone's seriously calling to disband the fire department (of course, the
hype says differently).

(Any spending related to Obamacare once it goes into effect is not even
addressed in these figures, so it would be additional.)

More imminently, there is a lot of hype about how a catastrophic "sequester"
would end up shutting down the federal government and ending meat inspections
and starving social security recipients (Democrat hype) or shutting down the
military and starving all our veterans (Republican hype) -- however, even with
the automatic sequester, the federal government budget would be larger in 2013
than in 2012; it's only a cut relative to the growth that was previously baked
into certain budget assumptions.

Other fun bits: In December the Republicans proposed tax reform which would
have raised revenue by keeping rates low but limiting deductions. The
Democrats didn't like the plan, they got their way, and ultimately there were
tax hikes instead. Besides not fitting with the headline programme of "let's
tax the rich!!" a salient reason that the Democrats didn't like this plan is
that _state income taxes_ in a lot of high-tax states electing lots of
Democrats are also a major source of income-tax deductions. That bit didn't
get a lot of press.

(Oh, and the campaign promise that's still on Barack Obama's website? $2.50 in
spending cuts for every $1 in new taxes, to close the deficit? Yeah, the White
House has proposed budgets and they don't look anything like spending cuts.)

~~~
jerf
To close the loop with celticninja:

1\. For a given desired government outcome there exists some optimal taxation
level. (This is a function, f(desired_outcome) = optimal_level, not a
constant; I'm not assuming a particular desired outcome here.)

2\. Unless you think the desired taxation level is 100%, it is possible to tax
more than the optimal.

3\. Even given optimal taxation it is still possible to obtain a suboptimal
result.

Given the sheer staggering size of US government intake, and particularly the
growth of the intake in the past decade with very little apparent growth in
government services to show for it (bear in mind the sharp growth began under
Bush and predates the financial crisis), it is hardly irrational that some
people might think that we are currently experiencing either or both of a tax
intake greater than the optimal or results not commensurate with the taxes
taken in by the government, in which either case the logical conclusion is to
not simply blindly increase taxes, either taking us further from the optimal
tax base or feeding an inefficient system yet more money to spend
suboptimally.

The per capita spend of the US government in 2013 is going to be ~$12,000 on a
per capita debt of ~$55,000[1]. The per capita spend of, say, France, was on
an income of 1.55 trillion Euro [2] and a population of 65.5 million, about
2300 Euro per capita, about $3000ish. It's not exactly unfair to wonder what
we're getting for that much more money.

[1]:
[http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_per_capita_spending.h...](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/US_per_capita_spending.html)

[2]: <http://www.tradingeconomics.com/france/government-spending> , though
you'll have to fiddle with it a bit

[3]: [https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&#...</a>

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OGinparadise
"Internet Archive Employees to be Paid in Bitcoins"

It's all fun and games until you work 4-5 years, and maybe you can get a
couple of pizzas with your savings.
<https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0>

~~~
scotty79
Does the time flow back for you?

~~~
OGinparadise
those that forget history...

