The Internet Archive To Pay Salaries Partly In Bitcoin, Requests Donations

hypnosec writes "Bitcoin is gaining popularity among mainstream sites lately and the latest to adopt the digital currency as a medium of donations and payments is the Internet Archive. Ready to accept donation in the form of Bitcoin, the Internet Archive announced that it wants to do so to pay some part of employees' salaries, if they choose to, in Bitcoin. The Archive, known for its storage of digital documents (especially the previous version of webpages), is looking to start part salary payments in Bitcoin by April 2013 if everything goes well."

Re:I'd quit

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm amazed at how stupid people are.

Bitcoins can be converted to other real world currencies ya know?

My company accepts bitcoins and this is exactly what we do.

Re:I'd quit

[trytoguess]

Understandable. Luckily that's not what's happening here:

"Internet Archive announced that it wants to do so to pay some part of employees' salaries, if they choose to, in Bitcoin."

That's a direct line from the article the summary quoted. I do admit though, it's a rather inefficient sentence if you want to get a point across clearly.

Re:I'd quit

[Dan541]

Nope, I figured out a way to make money off bitcoin. Which is pretty cool considering it's practically money for nothing.

Re:Roll up! Roll up!

[Troed]

the more people that join the pyramid the more the "bitcoins" held by people like the above poster are worth

No. During the last year and a half, when the value of a bitcoin went from $32 (at which price point I bought a few) down to just above $2 (at which price point I didn't manage to buy a few) and then back up to $30 again the number of bitcoin users has increased exponentially.

There's actually no correlation whatsoever between the number of bitcoin users and the price of a bitcoin, which could be seen as falsifying your statement.

On the other hand, it's well known that the bitcoin economy in no way functions as a pyramid or ponzi scheme: http://www.quora.com/Is-Bitcoin-a-ponzi-scheme [quora.com]

Re:I'd quit

[crtreece]

the most fiat currency ever conceived

You must have some non-standard definition of fiat that I have not encountered before. In the wikipedia fiat money [wikipedia.org] article, we see a few definitions:

• any money declared by a government to be legal tender.
• state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.
• money without intrinsic value.

Not being state backed would eliminate the first 2. You might personally question the "intrinsic" part of item 3 and you might not place value on it, some bitcoin mining machine performed a specific, well defined, item of work to create a bitcoin, giving it value within the community.

Merriam-webster gives:

• a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort
• an authoritative or arbitrary order

Creation of bitcoins requires effort, maintaining the blockchain requires effort, and there is no authority that can arbitrarily create bitcoins without doing the work, so I don't see how any of those would apply.

You seem to be equating bitcoins with flooz [wikipedia.org]or beenz [wikipedia.org].