What about setting up partial compensation on a sliding scale? If my rent+bills+other fixed expenses is X% of my income, I could just take as much as cash as will pay for that and take out the rest of the 1-X% in crypto
That said, unless there are tax implications of paying/getting paid in BTC that cause you to e.g. not realize gains, it's really no different than just paying the employee in all cash and letting them purchase as much crypto as they want with it.
There were other issues as well that contributed to the decision, namely:
- Legality: there are specific regulations around how employees can be paid. These stem, historically, from companies paying employees in coupons only redeemable at other company stores (think: railroad workers paid in coupons for the general store owned by the railroad.
- Reversibility: What happens if the payroll needs to be reversed? With bitcoin you can't. This is important for cases of fraud (e.g. stolen credentials), user error (e.g. mistyping hours worked), or bugs on our end.
- Anti-money laundering: We needed to be reasonably sure you weren't laundering money. In case you were, having a bank account makes tracing the money much easier. Coin tumblers and the like make obfuscation and cleaning dirty money trivial.
- User adoption and education: How many people really want this feature versus others in the pipeline? If we ship it, what load does this put on our support team to handle calls about bitcoin? About losing their private key?
These are a subset. There are many concerns. I hear you about employees taking that money and buying it anyway, but we did have additional concerns to think about. We weren't against crypto, but it wasn't a good fit for our platform, userbase, size, priorities, etc.
That said, unless there are tax implications of paying/getting paid in BTC that cause you to e.g. not realize gains, it's really no different than just paying the employee in all cash and letting them purchase as much crypto as they want with it.