Bitcoin wallet 110 weeks behind
Day 7.
Monday is the last day of Bitcoin living and it’s off to an exhausting start. My first night in the Bitcoin-paid hostel was not especially restful due to noise filtering in from Mission Street and my body’s usual skepticism about an unfamiliar bed. I have plans to meet with security researcher Dan Kaminsky in the Mission in the afternoon so it would be silly to head to the office. I’d love to go to a cafe to work but none in the area take Bitcoin. I don’t think I can take Bitcoin seriously as a currency until tech-forward San Francisco has at least one BTC-friendly coffee shop.
20 Mission has Wi-Fi. I place a Skype call to Pyry Lehdonvirta who is in Helsinki. He is the 29-year-old CEO of SC5, a Finnish HTML5 software developer that started paying 20 of its full-time employees partially in Bitcoin last October when Bitcoin was valued at $40 USD.
“The increase in [BTC’s] value has been bad for us, ” says Lehdonvirta. “It has paralyzed our experiment. You can’t spend them because it’s changing around too rapidly. We haven’t stopped using it, but it’s turned into this currency game.”
Lehdonvirta traded most of his own Bitcoin when the price spiked to over $250 USD.
“We are willing to accept Bitcoin as payment. We want to be part of an ecosystem, but the fluctuating currency rates are a problem, ” he says. The security of Bitcoin payments appeal to his company. “Banks and credit cards are not very secure. If someone steals someone’s credit card, it’s easy to use it and commit fraud. Fraud is much harder with Bitcoin.”
Lehdonvirta says Bitcoin has gotten outsized media attention given its current state of development.
“Lots of people are accepting Bitcoin just to get publicity, ” he says “But that’s not bad. As they want to get the publicity, they start accepting Bitcoin. And that’s a good thing. More people accepting it will make it much more useful.”
Earlier in the week, I spoke with Jude Gomila, the CEO of HeyZap, a mobile gaming company that has started paying freelance developers in Bitcoin. For him, the appeal of paying in BTC is even more pragmatic.
“Gaming is very international. We have developers all around the world. Some don’t accept Paypal because they can’t receive it in their country. And wire transfers can be expensive, ” says Gomila who has paid a “handful” of developers in the digital coin. “It makes sense for there to be a global currency in the world that everyone can use that doesn’t have a transaction fee.”
