How to accept BTC the safe way for our Art works?

[roebanan]

Hello to everyone!
We're looking for some advice to potentially accept Bitcoins from high-end art customers. I have read as much as I could about the subject but it's like opening the door into a new dimension and many things are hard to understand.

The situation:
We run a small art store with a select collection of valuable works. Lately we have received inquiries from people who are interested in buying artworks from us via Bitcoin. This is something we have never even considered and now we're trying to understand if it could work in a safe way.
The way we usually accept payment from such discreet clients are wire transfer via intermediary banking services that give the clients some kind of identity obfuscation (many art buyers are interested in anonymity!).
So we're used to having the money arrive at our bank account before we ship the artwork = zero risk.
If we wanted to do the same but with a payment in Bitcoin how and what should we do to be safe?
I understand that we need to have the payment confirmed 3-6 times to be sure it's not reverted, but what else should we worry about? It would be the idea to exchange the majority of these Bitcoins as soon as we them to €/$ as we need that to fund our new art purchases and also to not have any volatility risk.

We have tried to gather some info on other potential pitfalls like 'dirty' bitcoins rejected by exchanges, but from all the info on this topic we haven't been able to understand if this is a real danger/concern or a myth. Correct me if wrong, but it's not possible to check the Bitcoins before they arrive at the wallet is it? Like measuring how much cocaine are on the dollar bills before accepting these!  
When exchanges refer to the source/origin of these bitcoins are they simply asking us to provide proof that we just got these from selling Painting XYZ or are they referring to the chain of previous owners of the same Bitcoins?

I hope some of the experts here can shed some light on this situation so we can possible try to accept Bitcoins.

[Emoclaw]

The simplest way to accept Bitcoin would be to use BitPay: https://bitpay.com/
You can accept it online, by using their payment gateway, which takes care of everything. It's what many companies such as Valve (for Steam) use to accept Bitcoin.
You can also get a BitPay card which is a visa prepaid card that automatically converts your Bitcoin balance to USD when making purchases.

You shouldn't be concerned about the number of confirmations and all that. Once a transaction receives a confirmation it's irreversible unless there are some conditions such as a hard fork.
Exchanges are monitoring Bitcoin addresses that are related to malware, such as those used for the WannaCry ransomware payments. If Bitcoins from such addresses make their way to the exchange, that exchange usually seizes them. Anyone can monitor addresses because Bitcoin is transparent, but they can't be linked to identity by themselves. You shouldn't worry about that for your business. No criminal would risk buying something using unclean Bitcoin.

[GreatOrchid]

Use a third-party who might be able to help you out.

Bitpay is a good option, and there are some good options too like those payment gateways via bitcoin that are using some vpn providers, and a lot of stores at the moment (i dont remember the name)

But what if you just let them know and tell them that if they want to buy with bitcoin, they should talk to you by telegram? It is a very good way, you can meet ourselves, and who knows, maybe you can make a p2p transaction and they pay you using bitcoins.

It is a difficult problem, specially because there are no official ways to make it done.

[roebanan]

Thank you for the input - We're dealing with few transactions/year but they are in large sums (6-7 figures) so we need something that will work just as smooth as a bank wire, so that's why we haven't looked at bitpay or similar merchant services as we need to be in full control.
It would be interesting to discuss this from a perspective that we could be our own bank and that the payments would go to us directly (wallet) - We're considering paying for some Bitcoin consultancy on the subject but are these consultants more knowledgeable that the people on this board, I doubt it 

[roebanan]

But what if you just let them know and tell them that if they want to buy with bitcoin, they should talk to you by telegram?

Sorry what is telegram? 

If Bitcoins from such addresses make their way to the exchange, that exchange usually seizes them.

Let's just imagine that someone with such bad coins would like to trade these into an valuable artwork then it would be fairly safe for him to send these to our business and we would think 'great we got out payment' and then at some later stage we would figure out that our Bitcoins are worthless - how to avoid such a scenario in the first place? Any way to ask the buyer about his Bitcoins to run some test on them or similar (i'm just thinking out loud)

[aleksej996]

Your Bitcoins will probably never decrease their value because of their history. It is a very stupid concept that is unlikely to be ever implemented and no one proposes it as a good idea. Even FBI sold their's sized bitcoins they acquired from dark markets. It would be a 180 turn to say that the bitcoins they sold at an auction are worthless now regarding the government. Not that the government could ever be able to make such a huge effect on Bitcoin anyway.

I would say that you really shouldn't worry about tainting your coins and keep the records of what you bought and sold and for how much with the bitcoin transaction id associated with it.

[roebanan]

I would say that you really shouldn't worry about tainting your coins and keep the records of what you bought and sold and for how much with the bitcoin transaction id associated with it.

Good advice thank you Aleksej.


Ok, so the consensus here seems to be that our objective is simple and without danger - in the media there are many horror stories so i had expected many other potential pitfalls from such Bitcoin deals.  if it really works this easy then it could be a great way to settle some purchases I think.