The Bitcoin ledger is a new kind of payment system. Anyone in the world can pay anyone else in the world any amount of value of Bitcoin by simply transferring ownership of the corresponding slot in the ledger. Put value in, transfer it, the recipient gets value out, no authorization required, and in many cases, no fees.—Marc Andreessen
Getting paid in Bitcoin has been a breeze, except during the tax season, which can be complicated. I’ve done it for years now. I have also paid my rent and other bills using Bitcoin or dollars that I obtained by selling bitcoins.
It is a viable option for anyone with a marketable skill. Virtually anything that can be done online can be paid for in Bitcoin and the job market is quickly growing for in-person jobs as well. A total of $301 million in venture capital funds was invested into Bitcoin in 2014, a number that jumped to more than $314 million in 2015, and few will be surprised if that number increases again in 2016. That is a lot of start-ups looking to fill a lot of positions.
Working for a Bitcoin company is a sure way to get a steady supply of bitcoins, but doing quick and easy freelance work is also effective.
Where to Find a Job That Pays in Bitcoin
The first step to finding a job that pays in Bitcoin is knowing where to look. Coinality is the longest-running and likely most comprehensive Bitcoin job board on the Internet. It pulls jobs from individual companies’ sites, freelance sites such as Elance and Reddit’s subforum r/Jobs4Bitcoin to incorporate practically every Bitcoin job board on the web.
The most commonly available openings are, unsurprisingly, for coders. Bitcoin coders, web designers, mobile app developers—these skills are in high demand in the industry.
Writing is another good option. Most Bitcoin news sites accept news submissions. These news sites include CoinDesk, DeepDotWeb, Bitcoin Magazine, CryptoCoinsNews, and newsBTC. All pay their writers in bitcoins. Graphic design artists and copywriters are also likely to find a lot of work in the Bitcoin space.
For inexperienced or poor writers, shilling for a company by posting positive reviews is one way to earn some bitcoins, but this work is generally frowned upon by the community. Still, if one is desperate for bitcoins and doesn’t mind angering some people and shilling for less-than-reputable services, it is one way to go, but keep in mind that working for a scam can be seen as being complicit in that scam, so I urge caution.
Bitcoin employment isn’t limited to programmers and content creators, however. There is a growing demand in the industry for general business and marketing. As Nathan Wosnack, the COO of uBITquity and cofounder/CCO of Blockchain Factory, has pointed out:
Technology smarts alone will not suffice; you need to be able to speak the language of the layman. I’d say the biggest needs are marketing and PR people. People who know how to talk to the general public, create marketing campaigns, and reach the general public are sorely needed within the crypto currency space.
Bitcoin companies also need dedicated business development people with skills that span beyond crypto, and into general technology marketing. They need to have a grasp of the tech and the real life use cases. Because at the end of the day; if you can’t sell your product or service to the customers, your idea is worthless.
People in my experience have this foolish and often dangerous idea that with the advent of new technology (like Bitcoin and the blockchain) that the time-tested rules of business somehow don’t apply at all. Sadly, they are mistaken.
Working for a business is one way to go. Another is to simply work for tips. It isn’t the quickest way to turn a profit but putting out quality content and then asking for donations is certainly a way to pick up some bitcoins. Everyone from podcasters to musicians, bloggers, and artists has asked their audience to finance their projects. A few of them have managed to secure full-time gigs. I would suggest that anyone planning on going this route also accept other forms of currency, but Bitcoin can be a large and growing part of that income.
Selling Goods for Bitcoin
Selling goods, products, or services for bitcoins is another straightforward way to get into the Bitcoin ecosystem. Whether you have a business already and simply want to allow your customers to pay with Bitcoin or you want to resell goods you have lying around the house, there are numerous options available for accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment.
Currently, the biggest auction site where you can use Bitcoin is CryptoThrift. It has an eBay-like format and offers 30-day escrow on all sales (the seller is required to offer it and the buyer decides whether he or she wants to set it up). In 2014, CryptoThrift canceled its escrow service for a few months, citing security concerns.
Those problems have since been ironed out and escrow is highly recommended for all buyers. For sellers, this feature means that their funds could be held for up to 30 days, though in practice funds are typically released at the discretion of the buyers after they receive their items, assuming no conflicts arise.
Glyde is another peer-to-peer marketplace. Unlike CryptoThrift, it works with fixed prices, not unlike Amazon. The marketplace primarily sells cell phones, tablets, and video games. It provides insured shipping and packaging, and allows sellers to take payouts through a bank deposit, mailed check, or Bitcoin. Unfortunately, you can’t directly use Bitcoin to purchase products.
There are also open markets such as r/Bitcoinmarket and the BitcoinTalk forums. These options can be extremely risky because there is no built-in escrow, but using a reputable member of the community as an escrow service—likely for a nominal fee—can remove some of the risk.
If you own a business, you can obtain bitcoins in a way that has little cost to you and benefits the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. Accepting Bitcoin is easy and can open up your business to an entire world of users eager to spend their money at a business that accepts their preferred method of payment.
The results might vary. Some companies have expressed that Bitcoin sales have not been impressive; others have been very happy with their numbers. Regardless of the particular outcome, it costs almost nothing to add Bitcoin to accepted methods of payment, and merchants can choose whether they want to dive headfirst into the deep end or simply dip their toes in the water.
There are two options for businesses accepting Bitcoin: they can either handle the Bitcoin transactions themselves or let someone else do it for them. PayPal’s Braintree now allows merchants to accept Bitcoin for digital goods; Square allows merchants to accept Bitcoin and is working on a cash register that accepts both Bitcoin and Apple Pay; Shopify also allows its merchants to accept Bitcoin. These sites automatically sell the buyer’s bitcoins for fiat, however, so they are not suitable options for merchants looking to acquire and hold their own bitcoins.
This service is provided by companies like Coinbase and Bitstamp. These companies allow merchants to decide how much they want to keep in Bitcoin and how much they convert to fiat. A merchant could, for example, try to set the amounts in a way that ensures the store will always break even in fiat and keep its margin of profit in Bitcoin.
Alternatively, a store could decide to simply accept Bitcoin itself. It could have a local wallet installed, display a QR code, and have a computer or tablet set up to watch the orders come in. An easier solution would be to use a web wallet and a smart device to accept transactions. In either case, the merchant would then get to decide how much, if any, Bitcoin he or she wants to turn into fiat and when to do so.
By accepting Bitcoin, companies don’t just grab a small subsection of technologically savvy geeks; they also open their business up to the world. A customer in China can purchase a product from a US-based company using Bitcoin without worrying about bank compatibility or exorbitant fees. The merchant will have the advantage of irreversible transactions and avoid the credit card fees that typically range from two to four percent. Many companies, retail companies in particular, operate with extremely small margins and a three percent fee might take up to half of their profits. Bitcoin, whose fees are typically below $0.02, represents a real game changer for them. For companies counting every penny, Bitcoin is unique in its utility.
Why Work for Bitcoin?
There are several reasons why one might choose to work for Bitcoin. It is an easy way to obtain bitcoins. For freelancers, accepting payment in bitcoins will expand their customer base and cut out unnecessary middlemen.
Sites like Freelancer and Elance take a percentage of payment for each job. This practice hurts both the customer and the freelancer but it is the price of getting connected to potential employers and being protected from being taken advantage of. Bitcoin doesn’t just cut out the middleman; it can make doing business anonymously or near-anonymously much safer.
It also greatly increases the reach of your potential service. Anyone in the world can hire you if you accept Bitcoin. You won’t have to worry about currency conversion fees or bank fees or if their country allows commerce with your country.
Despite these gains, there are some issues with working for Bitcoin that are still being ironed out.
Issues with Working for Bitcoin
Smart contracts—computer protocols that ensure a contract is followed—have been developed for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and are getting more powerful all the time. Escrow is very useful because it gives the worker a third party to depend on to fulfill a contract if the employer decides not to do so. This situation isn’t always ideal, and the balance of power between customer and client can swing wildly depending on a variety of factors.
The ultimate goal behind smart contracts is to eliminate the need for trust. They aren’t quite there yet. And although escrow can be programmed, it still ultimately relies on the parties in the contract to act honestly. It is difficult, for example, for programming to determine if a website was designed to the client’s specifications or not, since the quality of work is often subjective.
There are some criteria that could be programmed, however, and this holds great value. A search engine optimization (SEO) expert could promise a certain level of hits, for instance, and the contract could draw statistics from Alexa.com and make the payment only when the site hits those numbers.
Of course, people will always try to cheat the system. It seems to be part of human nature. In the example above, the SEO expert might buy cheap, artificial traffic that will immediately drop off as soon as he stops paying. Both the client and SEO expert might have had an understanding that the traffic was supposed to be legitimate, organic traffic, but without some way to code that agreement in, the client could easily be cheated.
Despite some of the current dangers and drawbacks, working for Bitcoin has a number of advantages. When I wrote for CoinTelegraph, I wrote for people who live in Russia and for a site that is based in the UK. It had writers from Vietnam, Mexico, and all over Europe and the US. CoinTelegraph didn’t have the resources to work with the financial institutions in all those countries. It is unclear whether CoinTelegraph could have been launched at all had it depended on traditional financial institutions or PayPal. It was only through the global reach and permission less nature of Bitcoin that CoinTelegraph was able to accomplish that.
Bitcoin has opened up the world for people working online. The Internet made communication with these people possible, but it wasn’t until Bitcoin was invented that they could easily send you something representing value. The Internet made the world a global community. Bitcoin makes the world a true global economy.
