This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Have you heard the story about the first purchase ever made with Bitcoin? This is a crazy story. It was in 2010 when Laszlo Hanyaks paid 10,000 Bitcoins for two large pizzas. 10,000 Bitcoins, two delicious large pizzas. Well, at today's exchange rate, that's $540 million.
You know, it may be a billion dollars tomorrow, it may be $0 tomorrow, who knows? It's very volatile currency. But $540 million, 10,000 Bitcoins, that was the first transaction, of course, at the time it wasn't worth much of anything. It was worth about, I think, $25 or $30. Good price for two large pizzas.
Today's listener question is pretty simple. And on this topic, well, he's not wondering about how to make $540 million, that would be cool. No, he's just wondering about how to get paid in Bitcoin for your product or service, you know, whatever it is. But on that story about the 10,000 Bitcoins in 2010, this has been repeated in lots of different ways. And usually the way the story is presented is like, "Wow, this guy threw away so much money." You know, like if only he hadn't done that, imagine what his life would be like now.
And so it's easy to hear that story and think, "Well, I bet he really regrets that." You know, I bet he's like, "Man, that was the biggest mistake in my life." But the cool thing is, like, if you read the profiles of this guy, he's like, "Nope, you know, I was glad to do it." You know, it wasn't worth that much money then. It's not like I was throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars. I had no idea what would happen later. And so I'm glad to be part of that moment in history. And I'm like, "Man, what a great attitude." You know, that's my takeaway from it, because I'm like, "I don't know that I would feel that way." I might be like, "Well, I wish I had not ordered those two large pizzas, however delicious they were." Okay, so listener question, how to accept payments in cryptocurrency along with some limitations.
Our listener, Adam, will say more about that. I'll have an answer for him as well, right after this quick message from our sponsor. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Adam from Dayton, and I've been following the show since last year. Thanks for the helpful content. I'm working on an e-commerce site, and I'd like to add Bitcoin to our list of payment options.
Who knows if anyone will use it, but if they do, I'll just hold onto those funds separately and see what happens as the price continues to go up. I know that PayPal allows Bitcoin payments now, which is cool, but it looks like they automatically convert payments into dollars. That's not what I want. I want Bitcoin payments to remain Bitcoin with no cash conversion. You'd think this would be simple, but I've looked around a bit and can't find a good solution.
Do you know of one? Thanks. - All right, so first thing to say here is this is something that is changing all the time. I do my best to keep everything in the podcast evergreen in the sense that it's still relevant and helpful months and years into the future. But for things like this, it is changing all the time.
So in fact, now I think actually PayPal allows Bitcoin payments, and they don't automatically convert the way that Adam mentioned. At least that's my understanding. The challenge, however, is that for customers to pay with Bitcoin through PayPal, or also Ethereum, Litecoin, maybe some other altcoins as well, they have to store that in their accounts. They can't pay with something they don't have. They can't just say like, I have US dollars in my account, but I want to make this payment in cryptocurrency.
So in some ways it might be obvious, like if you don't have cryptocurrency, how can you pay with it? But the point is most people holding cryptocurrency, they keep it with accounts like Binance or Coinbase. They don't actually have it in PayPal. Alternatively, they can hold it in their own wallet, where they have total control over it. It's pseudonymous.
And they have to keep up with their passwords before they lose it forever. So it's that kind of thing, which is a very different group of people. So if you want to accept payments by Bitcoin for your tea shop or your Etsy store or anything else, technically all you need is a Bitcoin public address. Like you can post this on your website, you can send it in an email to someone, and then a customer who is blockchain savvy and knows how this stuff works could then send money to it. I think the bigger question is, how helpful is this to the average person right now?
And my opinion on that is not so much because Bitcoin is more useful as a stored asset than a way to buy and sell goods. Like it's actually pretty difficult to make payments in cryptocurrency for as much potential as the whole industry has. At least for now, the greater value in digital currencies is as an alternative asset to hold, as opposed to like, this is how I shop and how I conduct commerce and so on. But as I said, of course it could change. So we'll see what happens in the future.
And listeners, if you have a question of your own, come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. I will continue to feature them throughout the year, along with lots of stories and updates from other listeners as they launch their projects. I'm so glad you're out there in this new world, this new world economy. So many interesting things happening, and I look forward to sharing many of them with you. All right, that's all for today.
My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
