After talking with a potential client, he asked us the following question: “If for some reason the price of bitcoin jumps even more wildly, I’ll keep the payment to the equivalent asking price of $XYZ. Since you don’t have hedged escrow does this sound fair?”
Our current payment plan works with installments and depends on mutual trust, but it leaves us open to absorbing some fraction of the fees if a client never follows through with their final payment.
I guess this gives me pause because this service is an experiment, a test of the bitcoin economy’s health and the dynamic nature of the community. It’s a stone soup thing in that sense – the development and expansion of this service are predicated on the market demand for it.
You can now buy pizza for BTC. Whomever is operating that service is doing something really neat – manifesting a physical good for BTC. (Even better is giving donations to charity for BTC a la: www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/19oiht/rbitcoin_lets_share_with_those_in_need_for_every/. Being able to feed yourself with something is coming pretty close to ‘being money’ for me. Being able to pay rent, power bills, and shipping costs are still a ways off. I worry that these services will continue to be difficult to pay for using BTC as long as the main sources of physical goods available are VHS tapes on Bitmit (no offense intended).
Food is a funny thing like that – it’s worth more than gold or bitcoin if you don’t have it. The 10,000 BTC pizza will live on in infamy. It was paid for, eaten, presumably enjoyed, and now the story is all that’s left. Whatever the current value of BTC is is what determines our offers, but we’re not acting like investors – we’re trying to live in a fantasy world where we could can use the BTC we earn to sustain the service we provide. There’s nothing close to a hope of making this a full time job. If the community responds to overwhelm us, we will respond in kind – we think that’s a long way off at this point, but are happy that you’re considering having us work for you. Please leave your comments below and re-post this across the forums. Thanks!