Behind getting salary paid in cryptocurrency

On August 31st, a Chinese cryptocurrency news outlet released a post, reporting Mr. Liu’s experience of being forced to accept cryptocurrency as his wage. In response to the news, a local lawyer told the reporter that the cryptocurrency is not an authentic currency, and can’t be used to pay the employee. The company is also suspected of maintaining the circulation using cryptocurrency as payment.

In fact, whether companies could pay their staff in cryptocurrency and whether the staffs are willing to get paid in tokens, are two classical problems in the process of adopting mass adoption of cryptocurrency. People around the world are deeply divided over this issue, and the answer would be based on the attitude of the local governments toward the cryptos.

For instance, People in America and Europe, areas that more cryptocurrency-friendly and have mature cryptocurrency mechanism, are more willing to get cryptocurrency wages than those in China and India.

However, the problem with getting cryptocurrency salary is the token wage is not that easy-to-use for ordinary people. First, staffs who get crypto salary has to contend with the fast-changing token value. With the value increases, the purchasing power goes up and vice verse. Somebody may say if we can pay the bill using Chinese yen in Macau then we can pay it in cryptocurrency.

The point is how can it economically work? We just can’t pay the bill with Bitcoin in a time when Bitcoin price stands at $6,715 a minute ago and changed to $6,800 when finishing paying the bill. When it becomes a currency in everyday life we use to buy goods and products, it appears that we can't afford both the upward and downward trends.

Bitcoin price graph on September 1st. (snapshot from https://citicoins.com/bitcoin/charts)

Even the price of bitcoin cash, which is the most usable cryptocurrency in the market, shows 90% decrease in its value, the rate in bitcoin price history is more than 70%, let alone cryptocurrency launched by some small business. It will freak us out.

Second, people who own the private key, in theory, is the owner of the money in the account. Therefore, if you forget the private key, then you lose the cryptos forever, there is news reporting that up to 287m—379m bitcoin worth of $20 billion in today’s exchange rate was missed on the chain, most of which is caused by forgetting the private key. What's more, if people who know what your private key is, they can steal the money from you, which in the physical world we can turn to banks and institutions for help. No one can afford the loss if all your wage is paid in cryptocurrency wallet when there is no one could offer help to track it back.