Bitcoin Forum

NFL player Russel Okung for Carolina Panthers becomes the first player in NFL to be played in Bitcoin he earns 13million USD as a yearly salary and half of them will be played with bitcoin.
So in today market he will get roughly 20BTC per month and $540k in fiat

Russel is a clearly a bitcoin enthusiast as he tweeted back in may 2019 "pay me in Bitcoin" today he tweeted back at that tweed with this https://i.postimg.cc/vT3KkB0Y/20201230-003955.jpg

Considering the high demand (paypall buying about 70%) of the newly mined bitcoins) on bitcoin recently and these recent news promoting bitcoin this will bitcoin rise more.

Good for him, there are only a few personalities that are willing to wager some of their money into bitcoin. I really like his idea that half of the salary will be payed in bitcoin, hopefully this serves as a motivation for companies to integrate or at least consider integrating bitcoin or cryptocurrency in their employee's salary. 20BTC is a lot of money for a month, in his case, he might become a whale in a years time.

I agree that this great news can promote Bitcoin further. However, it will ruin the chances for the layman to buy BTC as the price will become outrageous. Additionally, this could also promote capitalization which nobody wants.

He seems to be a very intelligent guy! While he is arbitraging against the falling USD purchasing power and making his own income to appreciate for future, he is also taking fiat money to take care of ongoing regular expenses! Clearly a thought for future security!

Hopefully, more and more establishments will be encouraged to use bitcoin in future as the acceptance grows! Organic growth is what we need to make the bull run sustainable!

I already followed this guy on twitter for long time ago.
I just known that this guy is a NFL player, just wow. If you are updated on his tweets about Bitcoin, you can really see that he is for long term on Bitcoin.
I admire this guy because he is not some personalities who are just become a fan of Bitcoin once Bitcoin already in bull run not for this guy or some popular Twitter accounts that even on dumps and pumps of Bitcoin they are there.

Unfortunately he’s not being paid in Bitcoin, he’s just converting some of his US dollar salary into Bitcoin. He may well be promoting Zap ?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/29/22205181/nfl-russell-okung-not-paid-bitcoin-debunk-carolina-panthers-cryptocurrency

Even though the news isn’t quite correct , it is great news. Any high profile person promoting Bitcoin has got to be a positive thing  :)

Russell has laid the base, and we can see more number of players get interested on cryptocurrency. Already few companies have begun to pay their employees with bitcoin. Now the sports people are getting involved into bitcoin understanding the potential. Most of the time these players earn high, but weren't able to access and have control over it. This too seems to be a reason for the interest over bitcoin

yeah, seems that he is just shilling Zap for some provision, I mean fourteen tweets in a day, it is hard to imagine that someone is tweeting that much in a bounty campaign on the forum, not to mention NFL player
in the end, this could prove more damage than use, but every news covering BTC is a good one, since it will increase the community with some new participants, surely

Yea technically the money was converted automatically to BTC through Zap without Russel nor the other party needing to do anything(if I understand correctly). So yea, slightly misleading with the title, but hey, the other party sent fiat and Russel received bitcoin, and both parties got what they wanted/needed. Mission success.

Actually, it's a totally misleading title.
He is not paid in BTC he is paid in fiat and he uses that fiat to convert it into BTC like a lot of us do, receive fiat in your bank account and use that fiat to buy coins when you want. The only thing he did that is different is that he sent directly half of his wage to this strat-up via a direct deposit, nothing spectacular, Bitwage has been doing this for ages.

As for the mission, yeah 100% shilling success:

where is the proof of this?
i have heard this before and the other user also provided no proof. it also doesn't sound like a reality either because miners are spread around the globe and they each receive their bitcoins individually. for paypal or any other company to buy this newly mined coins they have to contact millions of individuals and convince them to sell their  coins to them which is never going to happen.
if you said 7% it would have made sense.

A lot of articles used this bad wording to describe the amount Paypal was supposedly buying. It's not 70% of the new coins but coins equivalent to 70% of the daily mined coins. Some of the newspapers went further and made a total mess (https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/paypal-cash-app-buying-newly-mined-bitcoin-2020-11-1029830600):
So, if you take it word by word they are buying 110% for the mined coins!  ;D

Besides, that was increased trading volume, which can be from one coin or a thousand, clickbait titles, just like the one that started this topic.

I don't disagree that it was misleading, but I don't think it worked as you described. Assuming that the description in this[1] article is accurate, the process was:

Panthers -> fiat converts to BTC through Strike/Zap -> Okung

rather than

Panthers -> Okung -> *buys bitcoin*

Again, I agree that it's misleading. But it's not like he just received fiat straight off and just manually bought the coins himself through a typical spot exchange. Also, technically, wasn't he paid in bitcoin? It's just that he was paid bitcoin by Strike/Zap because of the conversion and not necessarily by the Panthers.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.

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[1] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/panthers-russell-okung-becomes-first-nfl-player-to-be-paid-in-bitcoin-2020-12-29

It's actually like this, he received two paychecks a month:
a) Panthers > $500k > Okung's traditional bank account >fiat
b) Panthers > $500k > Okung's Zap account which takes direct deposits > bitcoin

The Panthers are just sending fiat transfers where he told them to do, they could have sent it to MtGox if he had told them so.

Bitwage (https://support.bitwage.com/article/13-how-do-i-set-up-my-direct-deposit-in-bitwage) was doing this for years, now ZAP copies it and it's revolutionary...this is the part that pisses me off a bit.

good explanation, it is clickbait but i also think it is kind of an FUD specially since we have no proof of paypal having bought any bitcoins ever since nobody has ever withdrawn any bitcoins from their platform. they are basically trying to tell people that paypal is going to own the majority of bitcoins (and control the price) otherwise there is no reason to use "x% of newly mined coins" as a metric.

Cryptonews in a nutshell - completely misleading titles and articles that only create hype and make investors FOMO. Add here the fact that so many people just read titles, and it's not hard to see how easily investors can become irrational and emotional.


Right, there's a huge difference between both parties using Bitcoin and directly transacting it, and one party using some centralized proxy - the latter can't be considered mass adoption

I would say both are correct as there are ways to get paid through bitcoin while your employer will be paying fiat. There are some services out there I guess which I can't name exactly at the moment. Nevertheless, what's ZAP? Any crypto?

LOL! Well, yes, the title is misleading, but that's good news for us anyway.

Every day we have more news related to bitcoin and if the price continues to rise, it will not be long before the FOMO enters the public again. Actually in google trends it has gone up a bit.

I didn't think an NFL team would actually pay somebody in Bitcoin. It was very good promotion for Zap though. Okung has been one of the most high profile Bitcoin supporters on Twitter. There have been other products that let you convert your paycheck into BTC but none has really gained that much traction. Maybe after all this hype we will see more people using these types of services.

There were few articles about him on coin sites which he states he just recieve BTC not really earning it but almost like it because zap converts fiat to BTC and then to him. This one here is a clickbait but its true he holds BTC and he said its the best decision he made. Learning and investing in BTC had changed his life forever.

I think that the commitment from him alone is good news. It's good publicity to Bitcoin. I don't see many people committing to get half of their salaries to be invested in bitcoin. He is taking a risk that will be a potentially high reward and he knows if he promotes it he will benefit from the rewards.
Other players playing for Brooklyn Nets and New York Yankees are also considering the move that Russel did no names yet to be disclosed according to Coindesk.

I’m pretty sure most companies and agencies wouldn’t want to do the same, especially that bitcoin’s price is rising day by day. They’d rather get the bitcoins for themselves then pay their people with fiat. It’s actually good that the org handling Russel Okung accepted this setup. It just opens up the possibility for bitcoin’s integration in the society as a whole—not only in payments and investments, but also on areas such as salaries, bonuses, and whatnot.

Good! While he's not getting the salary directly in crypto, this is a great way to promote crypto to the non-tech masses.

Let's hope he doesn't have many IRS fans :D

A first in the series of personalities choosing to do what is right for them. Although I wish more peopld will have the chance and liberty to choose how they are paid. Most of us are stuck being payed in our checking/savings accounts with no hope of growth since banks give you almost nothing in return. Hopefully this can be implemented to more jobs and not just to very famous people.

Hmm. I guess the huge advantage is that Zap actually accepts lightning? As it seems like Bitwage doesn't yet. While it seems to be pretty much the same business structure in an outsider's perspective, I give huge credit to services that goes and accepts LN.