Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Bitcoin Businesses

Sequoia Holdings Says Employees Can Draw Part of Salary in Cryptocurrencies (reuters.com) 49

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Software development services provider Sequoia Holdings said on Thursday its employees can now receive a part of their salary in cryptocurrencies, should they choose to. From a report: Under the new program, employees can elect to defer a portion of their salary into bitcoin, bitcoin cash, or the Ethereum platform's ether, Sequoia Holdings said. Earlier this month, Bitcoin, the world's most popular cryptocurrency, hit a record high of $40,000, rallying more than 900% from a low in March and having only just breached $20,000 in mid-December.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Sequoia Holdings Says Employees Can Draw Part of Salary in Cryptocurrencies More

Sequoia Holdings Says Employees Can Draw Part of Salary in Cryptocurrencies

Comments Filter:

  • Have fun with those tax returns! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pjt33 ( 739471 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @01:23PM (#60974160)

    I have prior experience of being paid in one currency and paying income tax in another. The hassle of documenting the exchange rates and calculating how much your income was in the taxable currency isn't worth it. Far simpler to just buy Bitcoin every month with your salary, if that's what you want to spend your entertainment budget* on.

    * As I see it, gambling comes out of the entertainment budget.

    • Yeah, getting paid in bitcoin means you still have to exchange some for your regular currency to pay the bills. You might as well exchange it the other way if that's what you want to do.
    • Why should it have to be a headache? The company could just report all of your earnings in whatever the currency is for the purposes of paying taxes in a particular jurisdiction and then convert that amount into whatever form you'd prefer to receive. If they agreed to pay you in some other form of currency, they can still do the conversion at the time of payment and report that amount. The US has some truly idiotic laws concerning taxing income that you earned in a different country, but that's a completely
      • Why should it be a headache?

        It doesn't need to be, but it is for all the reasons he laid out and you laid out.

      • You're not asking for it not to be a headache, you're asking for it to the company's headache. But why should your employer not just give you dollars and have you buy whatever you want with them. Unless it's something not easily purchasable (stock in a private company), there's no real advantage.

        US laws are pretty simple. You pay tax on global earnings. Pre-2017's tax overhaul, you deducted your tax from jurisdictions you earn the money in, so earning money in and living in a different country usually r

  • who in their right mind would want to get their salary in something as volatile as a crypto coin?

    Also Bitcoin's rally seems heavily tied to some shady money laundering over the last several weeks. With a new administration in town it's likely regulation is coming and with it a crash.

  • Good threads on bitcoin (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @01:29PM (#60974220)

    Here's an excellent Twitter thread [twitter.com] by Stephen Diehl (@smdiehl) about what Bitcoin really is (with an earlier one further down below).

    *** TRIGGER WARNING The Bitcoin boosters might want to overt their eyes! ***

    Let's discuss the environmental cost of bitcoin. Because despite all the push for sustainable and green investment in the tech sector, there's a giant smoldering Chernobyl sitting at the heart of Silicon Valley which a lot of investors would prefer you remain quiet about. Thread (1/)

    TLDR on bitcoin economics: It's a pyramid-shaped investment scheme backed by the collective delusion that value can created out of nothing by convincing greater fools to buy it after you do. [references earlier thread, also down below] (2/)

    That alone is sufficiently awful on its own merits, but on top of this the environmental damages of bitcoin are enough to make even Greta Thunberg weep at the pointless waste of it all. (3/)

    The underlying technology of bitcoin is based on the notion of "mining", a technical term for a process that keeps the network running and processing transactions. (4/)

    I won't cover the details of the algorithm, suffice it to say the premise of bitcoin mining is to prove how much power you can waste, and the more power you can waste, the more tokens you can probabilistically secure in exchange for your energy waste. (5/)

    And so people have set up entire warehouses of computer hardware dedicated to run 24/7 consuming power and performing the trial computations required by the protocol. Globally this consumes *nation state* levels of energy to keep it all running. (6/)

    Bitcoin mining is essentially a fucked up version of Candy Crush where you solve puzzles for coins, except the coins go to buy darknet fentanyl, launder money for warlords and provide gambling for hedge fund managers. (7/)

    And the scale of this waste has some scary numbers attached to it. A single bitcoin transaction alone consumes 621 KWh, or half a million times more energy consumption than a credit card payment. (8/)

    The bitcoin network annually wastes 78 TWh (terrawatt hours) annually or the energy consumption of several *million* US households. WolframAlpha gives some scary comparisons to help you relate to how much energy this is (think nuclear weapons). https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=77.78+terrawatt+hours [wolframalpha.com](9/)

    Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost. (10/)

    In addition to the energy waste and CO2 emitted, the mining process itself requires constant replacement of hardware and produces a steady stream of waste from broken and exhausted computer parts. All of which are full of toxins and rare earth metals. (11/)

    The network produces 11.27 kilotons of waste annually or 96 grams of electronic waste per transaction. This is the equivalent annual e-waste as several small countries and equivalent to the waste of 482,456 people living at the German standard. (12/)

    Try to imagine a future where paying for your morning coffee involved smashing an iPhone and burning enough fossil fuels to run your entire household for 60 days. That's the environmental cost of the "revolutionary" technology behind #Bitcoin in a nutshell. (13/)

    Climate scientists have estimated that #Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2C. And this is just one of *hundreds* of other cryptocurrency networks that run on this apocalyptically wasteful set of ideas. (14/) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [nature.com]

    Climate change is not some abstract threat happening elsewhere, it is very real, an

    • What is the total environmental cost of all the banks, servers, ATM.s etc. In the entire world?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        What is the point of your question? T those banks etc do all the work, cryptocurrencies likely do less than 1% of the work but have managed to use 0.3% of the world's energy usage whilst doing nothing useful in exchange.

        There is no comparison, current cryptocurrencies are abysmally inefficient at transactions.

      • False and deliberately deceptive comparison. The proper comparison is that of the average transaction cost of traditional transactions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JeffSh ( 71237 )

      What is the environmental cost of video streaming?

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • The cost of mining one bitcoin is similar to the price of one bitcoin, and the mining reward is getting chopped in half every 4 years, so the energy budget for mining actually shrinks over time. If bitcoin drops in value, mining will go down even faster.
          • If the mining reward gets cut in half every 4 years then the energy budget for mining a bitcoin doubles every 4 years.

      • What is the environmental cost of video streaming?

        A streamed video derives its value from the enjoyment of the person viewing it, not from the energy expended to stream it. Bitcoin is valuable because it uses energy. Apart from the ROI expected by the people mining it, there is no source of value. At least with fiat currency you're not burning energy just to make it seem like it's worth more. And precious metals and stones have very important uses outside of being a store for value.

        • Less than 10% of mined gold goes towards those important uses, so we could remove the other 90%. Gold mining costs a lot more energy than bitcoin mining, and produces more pollution as well.

          • Less than 10% of mined gold goes towards those important uses, so we could remove the other 90%. Gold mining costs a lot more energy than bitcoin mining, and produces more pollution as well.

            I find the argument 'at least it doesn't use as much energy as gold mining' unpersuasive. It's like you're selling someone proof of the electricity you used and nothing more. Forgive me if I don't see how that's good for humanity.

            • It's a good property of bitcoin, because it means you cannot produce new coins for less effort than it takes to earn them.

              Gold is just an example. People watching cat videos on youtube is another. The thing is that people like to get upset about bitcoin's energy use, but aren't nearly as critical about their own hobbies.

              Because profit margins are thin in bitcoin, miners automatically go to places where energy cost is lowest, which is usually a place where it is abundant, or even free. They could even help

      • The environmental impact of video streaming is orthogonal to the cost of mining bitcoins because the two activities don't relate to one another as alternatives.

        Nonetheless, video streaming has been architected to lessen the environmental footprint from its foundation. It replaces the alternative of traveling to a video rental store for pick-up and drop-off of discs, so it fundamentally is less carbon-intensive than its predecessor. The computing / energy resources required to support video streaming are in

        • Except that - in the past - the energy consumption was mostly up front and only spent once. Now you spin up inefficient PC-like devices and re-download the whole thing every time you watch it.

          Probably OK for throwaway blockbuster #73. But your kid's Disney Princess Foolina gets watched three times a week, and this is most definitely not environmentally friendly compared to a Blu Ray.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by N1AK ( 864906 )
            People spin up a little dongle that can be powered by the HDMI port on the telly, it's hardly inefficient or PC like. I'm not sure where the environmental impact balances out, but I imagine you're going to have to stream something pretty extensively to use more resources than are involved in producing, shipping, retailing, and collecting or delivering a Blu-Ray and its case, the energy used running the Blu-Ray player that needs to read all of the data from the disk each time it is watched, filling up landfi

    • "Unlike other economic activities, the bitcoin scheme produces absolutely nothing for all this waste. It is a pure speculative activity of people gambling on the random movements of prices and the only output is simply shuffling numbers around in a computer at insane cost."

      Two things, my salary and expenditure are just numbers in a computer.

      "insane cost" is also more numbers in computers, big ones that we collectively agree on being big.

      Resource consumption, definitely, but if energy was cheap and prolific,

    • I did that too, and it went fine.

      Of course, I was playing Monopoly at the time.

    • Funny, years ago, I accidently paid in Canadian Tire money while I was travelling abroad.

      Had to go back and give them real money, but they just thought the nice Scottish man on the money was our King!

      -Yo Grark

  • They can receive part of their salary in eggs and milk, for all I care - any item that has an assigned value can be given in lieu of salary.
    What would make a difference is a case where some of their salary would be *denominated* in bitcoin - i.e. "your annual pay is 5 bitcoin, paid in equal shares over 12 months". When we see that - it would actually mark a quantifiable step to bitcoin being anything other than a speculative asset with a negative intrinsic value.

    • I suppose that would be a step, but a small one. Unless the enough of your transactions are in bitcoin you might as well buy crypto options and take it in cash, since you'll have to transfer it back to cash to use it.

  • ...claims they bought a $40k Bitcoin for you that you didn't recieve into your account until BC had dropped to $30k.

  • Bitcoin, the world's most popular cryptocurrency, hit a record high of $40,000, rallying more than 900% from a low in March and having only just breached $20,000 in mid-December.

    and where has it gone since then? What's happening right now for instance?

  • I prefer the old way, a manila envelope with cash behind the dumpster.

  • You still have to pay taxes, so just buy it with salary. If you donâ(TM)t pay the taxes, then it will be stopped eventually and you be big trouble

  • CFO: "So we have all these bitcoin assets, and Yellen is about to utterly destroy their value"
    CEO: "So sell them before anyone figures that out!"
    COO: "Market is to thinly traded, our dumping would get noticed even if we try to conceal it and the price would creator"
    CFO: "What if we fob it off on our clients?"
    CCO: "Nah consumer protection board is headed by someone who actually thinks its a good idea again, we'll get fined"
    CEO: "Get HR in here"
    HR: "What's up I realized our diversity program does not specify

  • One can lose half the value over night for no discernible reason so it is a fool's wager.

Slashdot Top Deals

According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.

Close