Thoughts on using Bitcoin (SV) for freelancing or business in general?

Bitcoin SV is the original bitcoin fork that follows the original Satoshi design. Supporters include Craig Wright who is being sued for $4bn for being Satoshi Nakamoto. Practical advantages include:

- financial freedom & privacy (only I know how much I earn in bitcoin)
- niche market with very little competition (very few people use it at this point)
- 0 fees (no bank/payment processor commissions, forex exchange fees etc)
- users with high willingness to pay
- decentralised (nobody can ban you like on Paypal, Payoneer, Upwork, Fiverr)

Today Fivebucks, the BSV Fiverr alternative where fees for buyers are 0% and for sellers only 10%, reached 300 completed orders. I'm a freelancer there and haven't had much luck because I offer instagram shout outs but design gigs seem to be in demand at the moment.

So I'm thinking of doing the opposite, flipping services from Fivebucks (where everything starts from $5) to Fiverr. A lot of Fivebucks sellers are BSV enthusiasts and they underprice their services severely. For example, native speakers offering 500 word articles for $5. I have spoken to some of the sellers and most do this as a side thing to accumulate Bitcoin (SV) because they believe its price will increase 10x 20x fold in the long term. Very few people use Bitcoin SV right now and this creates an arbitrage opportunity. My idea is to cooperate with sellers on Fiverr who who need services from Fivebucks but don't know how to use BSV. What do you think?

 

Bitcoin is still totally unregulated and, therefore, quite risky. You can hold them and hope for a big gain in the market; or you can hold them and lose it all if the wrong person dies or something else bad happens. For risk-takers, that is a good thing. For others, however, it is not necessarily something they want to be involved with. However, if you make it easy for them, it could spur some additional users. I guess that my only caveat is that I would not want to own a business that had all of its transactions, revenues, and profits tied up in an unregulated currency like Bitcoin. You could work for years and suddenly find yourself without funds or options.

 

Bitcoin (SV) is money, so once earned you can convert it to USD if you do not want to hold it because afraid it might lose all its value. It is not true that it's unregulated, laws apply to Bitcoin too. What you mean probably is that it does not have an issuer, this is a good thing because it means that its supply cannot be manipulated so you have a guarantee of no inflation. Inflation is bad for your savings. I think overall this is really good mainly because there are no centralised services that act like gatekeepers and it allows to save a lot of money that normally goes to middlemen just for processing payments. Decentralised also means that it doesn't depend on one person, one person can die or retire and it doesn't affect Bitcoin at all because the miners (hundreds of thousands scattered around the globe) are the ones that make sure the wheels keep spinning. The only way for bitcoin to die would be by eliminating ALL its miners.

 

You make some good points. However, I recently recall hearing a story about some fellow who was a bitcoin leader of some sort in Europe (cannot remember the country) who died unexpectedly and his laptop was locked and unable to be opened. Somehow, it meant the loss of tens of millions of dollars to bitcoin holders. That is what makes it sound awfully risky to me.

 

I think you are referring to the story of the Quadriga CEO. This has nothing to do with Bitcoin security though. Quadriga was a Canadian exchange, exchanges are a 3rd party service. If you keep your money in an exchange, just like when you keep your money in a bank, if the exchange goes bankrupt, or gets hacked, or loses access to its wallets then you lose the money you were holding there as well.

As long as you are holding your own private keys (aka, keeping the money in your own wallet), your coins are safe and you (and only you) can always access them from anywhere independently from any 3rd party, centralised service.

 

Thanks for the clarification.