Bitcoin, OpenBazaar and Minifree/libiquity
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Why oh why do neither Libiquity nor Minifree accept Bitcoin as payment?
Also, why has OpenBazaar not been mentioned on the forum? If you're selling things online, I'd love to see your shop on OpenBazaar. I hope the people who have the ears of Libiquity and Minifree can convince them to put their stores on Open Bazaar. It would kill two birds with one stone!
I am a translator!
Just wanted to chime in to say that killing birds is really very wrong.
bitcoin is difficult accounting wise (Minifree is located in the UK, and has to pay UK taxes, like any other UK business, so it must keep accurate accounts of all income/expenses):
* most accountants don't understand bitcoin
* UK specific: for EU customers, (other currency) to GBP exchange rate set by HMRC (UK tax authority) must be recorded for VAT purposes. The UK government doesn't seem to have exchange rates for bitcoin.
(workaround is to do bitcoin sales in a separate "sole trader" business, without VAT, but that is a bit sketchy)
Bitcoin has a lot of practicality issues, at least with UK based businesses. This also applies to US businesses.
Minifree basically decided some time ago that using wire transfer is the best overall method for now. At least Minifree doesn't financially support credit card companies, and doesn't support PayPal either.
open bazaar has the same problem as bitcoin.
One can accept Bitcoin in two ways
* directly, which involves certain risks (Wikipedia is your friend)
* through a service which transfers bitcoins to your local currency, for a fee, which involves other risks (as in "things that happen in a free market economy")
Bitcoin is a legal payment system in the EU. Tax-wise bitcoin turnover is to be converted to your local currency and then taxed. Any reasonably educated tax advisor can deal with this and if they're unsure, they simply call the local tax office for a best-practice. Every tax office knows about bitcoin ånd/or other digital currencies.
While the 2nd option from above (payment through a payment provider) does make this easier and they do that work for the receiving end (it's then handled like an e.g. PayPal account by your tax advisor), which might be worth the fee. Bank accounts and payments processing is not gratis either in most cases.
Question is, should you trust bitcoin more than yet another payment provider. The answer to that is rather easy, because bitcoin is a payment system and not a greedy company that drowns little kittens (many, but not all, payment providers shouldn't exist because they're fraudsters).
The payment methods mentioned by the previous poster, involve *huge* charge-back risks for the receiving end of the transaction, so it makes sense to avoid them. Bank transfer doesn't involve any risks like that. Using an ethical bank makes that even more fun.
In any case, bitcoin is _not_ the answer to everything and simply just another payment method. If someone doesn't want to implement a payment method for their own reasons, let them, we're a free people.
It is far too easy to escape taxation with Bitcoin and with most crypto-currencies. A good electronic payment system (taxable because anonymous for the sole buyer) is GNU Taller: https://taler.net
The only problem is: it does not exist yet!
In that case, you're trusting yet another payment processor to convert your bitcoins into fiat currency (GBP, EUR, USD, etc), and the exchange points are usually quite shady; I trust them even less than PayPal (and here's what I wrote about paypal -> https://minifree.org/paypal/ - paypal is evil). They're basically PayPal, but regulated even less.
A bitcoin exchange is not a bank, and you are literally giving it your money. It can do what it wants with your money. Banks are at least regulated; they can only seize your funds if you run an illegal business (or if you're Edward Snowden or wikileak).
All it means is that the customer can use bitcoin, but then you consider that Minifree (or Libiquity) pays its suppliers in fiat currency (GBP, EUR, USD). The customer who paid most likely already converted it from fiat currency anyway.
In the end, there's very little benefit to actually using bitcoin at all for this type of business. For digital services (hosting companies, contracting someone for software development, etc), bitcoin makes more sense.
GNU Taler looks interesting.
When a viable method of accepting cryptocurrency does exist, Minifree will certainly use it.
Bitsquare just came out. No need to go through a corporate middleman to exchange your BTC.
I am a member!
Really looking forward to using Taler. I think they said 2016. Does anybody know of a narrower time frame (i.e. summer, fall, month X, etc...)?
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