Bitcoin Forum

Does anyone make a living using bitcoin as their main transactional currency for normal trading in services/goods? (Not exchanges and not gambling.) I find the the fact it is naturally international very attractive as a means of exchange, but find some of the claims a bit wild which puts me off.

I got to an early prototyping/alpha stage last year with a project and it failed to go anywhere. (I learned a lot, and got a new job in development, so not a waste of time).

I was wondering whether to put any more time into it.

Well a lot of people did sign up for services like bitwage and are paid in bitcoin.So its definitely expanding.
The use also depends on what part of the world you are based in.

Personally I have never seen real life usage of BTC, only histories of people using it.

I think the core problem currently is that most employers dont know the vast advantages of payment to employees with bitcoin.
We currently have an information problem. The current media isnt interested in reporting stories on BTC for various reasons, and the few times that they do have a story its usually negative in nature.

This will all change with time IMHO, i just wish the change will happen sooner rather than later...

I personally dont think its too far fetched to have great deal amount of people being paid, at least a portion of their salaries in crypto in the near future.

The beauty of an investment like Bitcoin is that you can invest and not put any more time in it than needed to store safely your bitcoins.

There is real world use of bitcoin if you live in the US. Most large merchants accepting bitcoin if you live in the US. Users like us from the "rest of the world" can only buy gift cards with bitcoins and spend them as fiat. There is nearly no highstreet shops which accepts bitcoin. I hope this will change very soon.

You are assuming the employees would like to be paid in bitcoin. Probably they find it odd to be paid in a currency thats so volatile and it's not attractive for them so they'd rather get paid with fiat.

I think Bitcoin is the best solution for international money transfers and online shopping. I don't find it useful for grocery shop or go buying beer in a market. If I want to buy something from Aliexpress/eBay etc. I prefer to pay with Bitcoin though.

I saw a guy buying some coffee and a diary in NYC from a shop that had a small mark that said "bitcoin is accepted here". Cute.

I've yet to see any local places accepting bitcoin, but always on the lookout. I know their are some sites that will show you local places that accept bitcoin.

Drugs, child porn, assassins, terrorism, ponzi schemes, scammers.  :(

Holy f*ck this entire thread is one big signature banners billboard.

Why do the site owners allow this?  Unbelievable.

-B-

More than 50 000 internet companies accept Bitcoin through Bitpay : https://bitpay.com/integrations

Just like the e-commerce days,
it needs a lot of time from tech emerge and user adoption.

AFAIK there is a newly married couple who went around the world solely on Bitcoin. The website is here: http://lifeonbitcoin.com/. It actually turned out to be pretty successful. It is actually possible for people to live of bitcoin as the adoption rate rises.

And you are assuming that massive adoption would not help price stabilization. The truth of the matter is that we will never know until it happens, and i for one think it will eventually happen.

Yes, I use BTC to buy a lot of things via Brawker. The only trouble you'll have there is when dealing with merchants that don't have accurate inventory systems or with products that may sell out quickly.

I always buy cell phone minutes via bitrefill.com - I love that service. I have also used services like coincrack.com which I use less frequently but I find valuable. I also made some small donations to groups like the EFF, which I never would have done before BTC came along. I also bought my Trezor directly with BTC, and I love that system.

I do a lot of international business so I am constantly looking for opportunities to spend BTC and avoid local currencies. BTC really is the perfect global currency.

i think bitcoin really has potential in countries where there is hyper inflation & high transactional costs
but lets fix the wallet, lets make a wallet that is easy for even a child to use
fix that and bitcoin will have more widespread usage

What we need is more and more and more merchants accepting btc in everyday uses and not only in internet based services.

What needs fixing about the wallet? I don't think beginners should use the QT wallet but the lite clients or blockchain.info seems pretty simple to grasp. Blockchain.info isn't really that much different from PayPal really.

I have never seen, but if it's there I was quite happy, just bring Android to conduct transactions via QR code haha

Bitcoin qt is not great for not tech savy users and blockchain.info is so easy to use.

This is not a barrier. Coinbase, Circle, etc. are all as easy to use and understand as PayPal. Electrum/Breadwallet/Mycellium/Trezor are simple and easy to use too.

The only real reason BTC hasn't taken off is because we all do a really shitty job marketing it (which is to be expected, anybody on this forum is a nerd and not socially influential). The scarcity of the thing needs to be promoted, and it isn't. I don't hear about BTC in rap music; I hear about USD.

I think if the BTC community started privately crowd-funding a series of professionally made Vines or other short videos strategically promoting BTC on social networks this process would be sped up.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/social-network-structure-helps-trends-emerge-from-simple-interactions/

 

What is so complicated about bitcoin-qt?
@op making a living only from bitcoin requires alot of them to be profitable only by trading.
There are people tho who are working jobs that are strictly bitcoin related, but i doubt they're paid in bitcoins, if that is what u meant to ask.

cheers

Im not trying to devalue any of your points, but you do know there was a major college bowl game sponsored by Bitcoin this year right?

I think if Taylor Swift was wearing a BTC shirt in her next video it would certainly help promote the movement.
Any national publicity by celebrities or athletes would be positive.
It would be really awesome if an up and coming athlete requests his team owner pay a portion of his salary in BTC.

Once this happens, ESPN will be talking about crypto and then the flood gates open...

>major college bowl game sponsored by Bitcoin
>Taylor Swift
>up and coming athlete requests his team owner pay a portion of his salary in BTC
>dogecoin NASCAR

Certainly all great examples of wasted marketing dollars.

Bitcoin is completely unrelated and unrelatable to these audiences as it is. Just saying "here's this thing, it's better than the thing you currently have and here's why blahblahblah" does nothing to grow your market and is a perfect example of how engineer-centric business fail at basic marketing tasks and languish in the marketplace. Generally speaking, people are fucking stupid and are driven by emotions, not reason.

The public needs to understand Bitcoin:

1. is almost unattainable (scarcity)
2. is desirable (because socially important people use it)

And:
3. we don't care about them and they can go fuck themselves (time constraint - they need to join now to be cool, not later)

Nothing else matters. The economics, technology, all the things we talk about in here - meaningless to the general public. Again I think in general people will start using BTC organically in time. But the question is do you want to wait 5-10 years for that to happen, or give it a strong marketing push and make it happen in 2 years?

I made my money hoarding it...and it's real use for me was to basically circumvent ebay via the darkmarket....paypal and I don't get along.

Everybody else is mistaken about
A Great
Many
Things

purse.io is amazing. first great real world use case for btc, one that i actually recommend to others.

there are already people making living even more then living with bitcoins there are alot of bitcoins related businesses like i am selling webhosting for bitcoins and making living

in 2ish years of knowing about and possessing btc i have never once, not one time ever, bought a single item in the real world using bitcoin ... why ? ... because it's a fucking joke that it's easier than the current monetary system of bank transfers plastic and hard cash ... it isn't ... duh ... obvious duh ... i have only ever used btc as a trading mechanism for increasing my *actual* net worth in dollars ... as do the vast majority of btc users ...

It may be difficult to spend btc in the real world right now, but the goal of bitcoin is to be adopted by the mainstream and to be a viable alternative currency and payment method which I believe it can be, it'll just take time.

I've used btc a lot to buy steam games in the past. Not have had too much to do with them here in europe yet. Wish more stores would start accepting them here.

I can confirm that through bitcoin we can earn something.
Through different signatures campaigns on this forum I'm earning some money each month.
Already a few times I cash out this earnings to my paypal account.
Right now, I'm looking in other possibilities to earn some bitcoin online.

I've spent a lot recently in steam keys myself, its a nice way of getting cheaper games from 3rd party websites.

I can't really use Bitcoin to pay for goods I buy on an everyday basis. I also think Bitcoin isn't really made for being used as a way to pay for your grocery shopping or trips to the drugstore. I actually believe this notion or idea will more or less fade into obscurity. I see Bitcoin's value elsewhere!

If I had a solid stack of Bitcoins (100+) I would use it daily for everyday purposes, but when I think about spending Bitcoin for some irrelevant daily good, i feel like im using gold to pay for groceries.

I agree. It seems like a tremendous waste to use Bitcoin for everyday expenses.

My friend, dont you see how your way of thinking is completely incorrect?
The more mainstream BTC becomes, the more its value will increase.

What do you think would happen to the value of the US dollar tomorrow if it was not the world currency to trade crude oil globally?
The Value of anything is directly tied to its usefulness and desirability.
 
The day that BTC is used as a common form of payment for daily consumables, i assure you a single coin will be worth much much more than $220 (price of this post)

I think many people have a long term goal to make fiat by hording BTC, but this approach is fundamentally flawed.

if you receive bitcoin as payment in some way(u work for BTC, u own a BTC business or are a miner, etc), you would be more than happy to pay things with BTC, instead of using exchanges to convert it for cash

I'm planning an e-commerce c2c business.
When I'm done I'll post details.

Yes, I agree with this.
But, it seems that is very difficult to make such ''breakthrough'' with bitcoin right now.
Most average users selling bitcoin in panic, and price of BTC falling every day.
It's very difficult for people to see ''long term vision'' behind bitcoin and believe that one day bitcoin will be strong as any other main currency in the world.
We urgently need ''big'' merchants to start accepting bitcoin right now, so that people start spending bitcoin instead of selling it.

I keep looking up at the date of the OP and am baffled that the thread is from 2015, I was thinking it was 2014 or 2013 asking if anyone is using Bitcoin for every day purchases.

I get paid in Bitcoin and use it all the time.

If you buy something online there's no reason you should be pulling out a credit card if you have bitcoins.

Here are some useful day to day sites for spending bitcoins.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=943143.0

yes now I am just making a living in bitcoin, and rely on bitcoin :)

and the results are quite happy, rather than working factory :)

But I think the point is it's rare you can spend your bitcoins online on things you want, at least not directly. It's a bit of a hassle converting them to gift cards etc everytime, also add to the fact of bitcoins depreciating value is worrying.

there is a lot of sites which accept bitcoin already
i think the main reason is that bitcoin blocks is slow thats why there are tons of shitcoins nowadays trying to take its place with 1 minute time block

Getting 10-30% off of your purchase should motivate anyone to switch to spending bitcoins online even if they don't like Bitcoin. Most things I would want to buy are available on Amazon. Everything else online you can get a discount through brawker.com

A lot of people go to retailmenot to get a $5 coupon before purchasing something. Putting your order on a site like purse.io or brawker isn't much more difficult.

noah's ark for sinking faits ?

I've sold a number of items on eBay in the past. A few days ago I received my first bitcoin payment for an eBay sale(agreed upon by the seller). If eBay decides to incorporate BTC into their service as a valid payment method, I hope they do not abuse it.

OpenBazaar will make that point moot.