
Ask HN: How can I convince clients to pay me in Bitcoin and is it a good idea? - zacinbusiness
Just what the title says :-)
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onion2k
As a little thought experiment, imagine someone who you buy services from told
you that they wanted to be paid in Burmese kyats. That's the currency of
Burma, a country with a population of 50 million people … e.g. it's bigger
than Bitcoin. Would you bother buying their service? Probably not. It'd be far
too much hassle. Bitcoin is exactly the same - if you're interested in it then
you've researched it, learnt about it, and perhaps bought it using a secure
service and stored it in an offline wallet. If you aren't interested in it,
you might have heard of it, but nothing more than that, so the steps you'd
need to take to buy from you would be ridiculous.

~~~
zacinbusiness
Interesting point! I like to think that all of my clients are forward thinking
and techy, but it doesn't make business sense for them to deal with the
additional hassle of buying or exchanging their currency and then transferring
it to me. So I guess the next question is this, how would it be possible to
facilitate BTC payments? I suppose one would have to act as an intermediary,
as in some kind if bank-like service that treats all currency as "foreign" and
converts to BTC, just like if I were to accept Kyats as payment they would
automatically be converted into USD by my bank...is that correct?

~~~
dangrossman
Why do you need an intermediary to do this for you automatically? Just take
the USD your clients pay you, and head over to your favorite broker/exchange
and buy Bitcoin with it.

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impendia
Right now, you don't.

Currently, having watched the whole Mt. Gox fiasco unfold, and having read
from at least one HN poster who lost over US$100,000 worth of bitcoins, I
wouldn't touch bitcoins with a 100-foot pole. I understand it's safe _if_
[list of conditions which I 80% understand], but that's little consolation to
me.

But certainly there is no harm in giving clients the option.

~~~
zacinbusiness
Yeah that gets to the "is it a good idea" portion. Honestly, the fact that
there is any faith in Bitcoin is amazing to me. And I believe that it's a
resilient currency that will bounce back from the current controversy. But I
do fear that it may collapse entirely, especially if governments start getting
involved and trying to regulate it when they can scarcely understand
traditional money, or even other much more simple concepts.

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patio11
You should _not_ attempt to make this sale.

Serious companies will not pay you in Bitcoin. Serious companies
disproportionately can actually attempt to pay market rates for engineering
services. Signaling desire to be paid in Bitcoin tells serious companies "I do
not wish to do business with serious companies." and, while it won't convince
them to pay you in Bitcoin since no power under earth or heaven will do that,
it might convince their decisionmakers to go with someone who is not a joker
for their professional services. This will cause you to systematically get
paid far below-market rates for your services.

Why won't serious companies pay you in Bitcoin? Let us count the reasons:

1) Why should they? They already have a bank account, which can issue checks
and wires. This is what they use to pay substantially everyone.

2) They have layers of processes and scar tissue built up around payments,
precisely to make sure that something like "And then the bookkeeper looted 80%
of our assets without us knowing it" could never happen. None of these
processes contemplate Bitcoin. They're the bones and sinews of the company.
You will _not_ succeed in changing them from the outside. As tptacek how
likely you are to even alter fairly inconsequential details of a large
company's procurement process, like how long it takes them to physically issue
a physical check which all parties know only actually takes a minute of typing
and Ctrl-P to create.

3) Serious companies have serious professional advisors like lawyers and
accountants, and serious professional advisors are very risk adverse. They're
going to come up with all sorts of perfectly serious reasons why issuing
payments in Bitcoin is a high-risk low-reward activity. For instance, in
Japan, you need to keep your books in yen. That's non-negotiable. Even if the
numbers you use for management of the company in something really exotic like
dollars, the official books must be in yen, and the National Tax Agency will
occasionally ask you for line-by-line justifications. Your accountant is going
to hear "Bitcoin transaction" and start trying to fit that into double-entered
yen based bookkeeping, and if he actually understands what Bitcoin is doing,
he's going to say "This sounds like a whole heck of a lot of work. Why don't
we just pay them via wire transfer like we always do? Also, I'm having
difficulty valuing 100 BTC for the purpose of paying withholding taxes on our
payment to him. I sort of don't want to lose my license for assisting with tax
evasion -- can we _please_ pay with a wire transfer?"

If you desire to speculate in Bitcoin, you can acquire it in the same fashion
as you buy Magic Cards, Beanie Babies, or shares in Google: get paid in
dollars, then buy the thing from people who sell it for dollars. (I would feel
negligent if I did not say "But you should not speculate in Bitcoin.")

~~~
trevelyan
I pay some of my staff in bitcoin... it is cheaper and easier than using
Paypal to be honest, and significantly, significantly cheaper than dealing
with international wire transfers. And when they need cash they can sell at a
markup using localbitcoins. Yes, I also have a small business without "layers
of processes and scar tissue built up around payments," but is this really the
community to trash startups?

The easiest answer to the parent poster's question is to offer a slight
discount for bitcoin payments. Or just accept cash and use that to purchase
bitcoins as needed. Doing a bit of SEO work around bitcoins can also make your
business more visible to people who want to pay using it. I currently pay for
some server infrastructure in BTC as well, and found those companies through
web searches.

~~~
emmett
You really pay full time staff in bitcoin? What happens when the value of
bitcoin varies by more than 2x in a short period vs local currency? How do
they afford rent?

If you're just using it as a transaction medium (give them $6000 per month,
transfer as BTC, immediately change back to dollars) that would avoid the
issue I suppose. But how is that better than direct deposit in any way?

~~~
trevelyan
Not full-time staff, and it isn't their main source of income. The alternative
is international wire transfer, which would cost me 30 USD and them a portion
of the payment as well.

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nkuttler
Don't try to convince anybody. Just present it as an option, maybe with a
small reduction.

~~~
zacinbusiness
Ah that's a good point. If I wanted to make it as simple as possible for them,
what would I need to do? Or can I simply add it as an option in the invoice?

~~~
FatalLogic
You could simply let them know that you will accept it. They'll tell you if
they're interested. Just _suggest_ , don't attempt to _convince_. It may not
be welcome.

Payment methods would be either through a third party processor, or as a
direct payment to an address.

Making people change their way of doing things is _hard_. You will find it
more rewarding to promote your business to people who already use bitcoins.
You have an opportunity there to find new clients.

However you do it, offering a discount at the start will help.

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EliRivers
I know very little about specifically convincing people to give me money, but
I do know that when I want someone to do something, I need to make it easy.
The ideal is to make it so easy that it's harder NOT to do it.

By trying to get paid in bitcoin, you'll be making it _difficult_ for people
to give you money. All else being equal, this is a very bad idea.

