Open up a wallet so I can buy fancy skins and sub with crypto.

Be nice to GS! Don't make them your dump grounds for the BTC that nobody wants to buy now.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/bitcoin-price-cryptocurrency-falls-by-more-than-2000-in-12-hours.html

+1

I don't think its wise to speculate on your paycheque Incarnate. -1

Dead people can pay with bitcoin? But what about those that are still alive?

The transaction fees fees for $10 equivalent in btc would make this an unwise idea.

Yeah, the lengthy transaction times and high fees to "skip the line" on transactions makes a lot of "vendor" type usage of Bitcoin pretty problematic. If we accept the long wait on the transaction, there's a good chance that $10 isn't $10 by the time we get it.

To accept BTC we'd probably need to implement some kind of "delayed-acceptance" where only the amount that comes through the final transaction, converted to dollars, is what's accepted (be that above or below the intended valuation at the "purchase time"). That might make more sense for a "crowdfund" system to make donations for development-target bounties or something, and not for the regular business model that has fixed price-points. Plus, it would be complicated to implement, and might piss some people off, since it's not the traditional way BTC is processed.

I'm not generally opposed to supporting cryptocurrency, but any new billing system (best-case) has a lengthy implementation and test-period (several days, maybe a week), because obviously we have to be super careful that it's all working robustly and securely. That's a lot of effort. Some kind of specialty implementation, like I mention above, is even more time consuming..

There are more cryptos than just Bitcoin, Litecoin is a good alternative to the issues you bring up being multitudes faster at transaction processing, and having much cheaper fees for "instant" processing.

Since JJ's article(nearly a month old at this point), BTC has gained 5,000-3,000$ USD in value, though it makes sense an anti-capitalist wouldn't be very bright at economics.
https://www.gdax.com/trade/BTC-USD

Yoda post something constructive.

The fee on 10$ of bitcoin is 8 cents and taxed at a lower rate than USD, which in comparison has 10x the fee and 2.5x the taxes.

I think you misunderstand the point of JJ's article, which is that the cryptocurrencies are incredibly volatile, which makes them problematic to accept as a standard of currency for goods and services.

The fee on 10$ of bitcoin is 8 cents and taxed at a lower rate than USD, which in comparison has 10x the fee and 2.5x the taxes.

I'm not really following you there. We certainly don't pay 80 cents per transaction on USD billing with credit cards. Or anything even remotely close to that.

You can already get Bitcoin prepaid VISA, why not just use that? It saves us lots of engineering time and hassle.

I find the volatile nature an opportunity, and bitpay doesn't make the cost per transaction any better. This is something that would be worth investing a bit of developer time in the long run it would be much more secure to be in house than using a thirdparty.

I don't know how much you pay per 10$ transaction, but at least on the tax end it's a lot better.

We're taxed as a corporation on income, I don't think there's any difference in taxes at all.

You're somewhere between 38%-55% at the end of the day depending on how much income, crypto is taxed at 10%-35%

Just to play devil's advocate, the volatility could work in your favor as much as it would work against you. At the end of the day, when you accept duration payments for time that works out to less than the $10/month rate, a dollar or two either way isn't really going to skew the numbers that much balanced over a period of time.

That being said, it still doesn't sound like a worthwhile investment of time for the limited return. VO's barrier to financial success is not that Guild doesn't accept crypto currencies. Any implementation would only serve a very small fraction of users that would choose to pay this way.

I don't disagree, only one of many steps towards the goal.

Mi5, There's no such thing as a "crypto tax rate". It's just standard capital gains, like selling any stock or bond. And since we aren't holding cryptocurrency for 12 months or more, it's ordinary income rate for the corporation.. thus, there is no "tax benefit".

Savet, I understand what you're saying, but actually your argument only holds true if the fluctuation is random (both positive and negative), and doesn't hold true in a long-term downward slide. But anyway, big picture, I agree that it's a lot of time to invest for probably an incredibly small userbase.

The only other value is if Bitcoin somehow drove a bunch of new users to us, specifically because we accepted bitcoin. And that might be possible, but.. there are an awful lot of good things we could add in the same time it would take to add bitcoin (or any crypto-currency support).

And, in the end, it wouldn't be any more "secure" to have it in-house than to use a third party, since we would be immediately converting it into dollars anyhow.

I'm not a corporation so I wouldn't know, you made a good point of people coming just because we accept bitcoin.

I meant secure not in a network safety sense, but a financial one.

It doesn't make any difference if you're a corporation: if you're in the United States, the IRS taxes crypto gains as standard capital gains. Mi5, if you're generating a lot of money from crypto investments, I sincerely recommend hiring a solid accountant this year, and being really transparent with them. Getting audited later can be very unpleasant.

There's no added financial security to having a direct gateway for crypto billing, versus suggesting people get a pre-paid BitPay VISA. The only argument to be made there, is if we kept the currency in crypto and didn't convert it to dollars (which we aren't going to do, due to volatility). Otherwise, it goes through the same kind of transaction either way to be converted into USD, so it has the same margin of "security".

Again, I'm not opposed to working with cryptocurrencies, I think they're interesting. But the "marketing" value is the only one I've seen, along with some limited statistical data about bitcoin "tipping". And it hasn't been enough to offset the substantial hassle of implementation.

Currently the fee to proccess a bitcoin transaction in 60 minutes is around $20. So a one month payment would cost a user a bit over $30 USD equivalent.

I've got a good accountant, been self-employed for a majority of my life.

This was the fee for 30$ worth of BTC, instantly. 24 cents.

You mention the word "instant", and that would be a reference to a zero confirmation bitcoin transfer. Zero confirmation transfers are risky in that they are reversible via attack. You need to wait at least for at least one confirmation(10 minutes on a good day) to have some resemblance of a safe transaction. (6 confirmations is the true standard, which takes about an hour unless the network is experiencing congestion).

Do you have TXID for that transaction so we can plug it into blockchain.info to see the fee?

Links of interest:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html#3m
https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

--

Also note that last month Steam stopped accepting bitcoin.