Should you price things in bitcoin?

- What would be a good way to price or advertise a service or product in Bitcoin, an up to date conversion in dollars to Bitcoin, a weekly, monthly average, or set a price in Bitcoin and review and update the price if needed. The volatility puts people off paying in Bitcoin and using dollars is perceived to be easier, even when it's more difficult. Advertising the fact that you accept Bitcoin or offering a discount sometimes gets a bad reaction, and you could lose potential customers, because you're seen as a kook. My work is completely unrelated to Bitcoin or technology. Those are great, great questions.

Pricing things in bitcoin is not a good idea (right now)

So in my experience, pricing things in Bitcoin is not a good idea. So if you think about Bitcoin as a system of money, and every system of money has at least three characteristics, it can be used as a store value, as a medium of exchange and as a unit of account. Bitcoin is not a good unit of account. Due to its small size and limited liquidity, when operating on a global basis, it is subject to much more volatility than people are used to. So as a result, it's not good for pricing things, because pricing is about an intuitive grasp of value, and you don't get that with something that's volatile. So, if I tell you a coffee is worth 23 bits or 0.0017 Bitcoin, that doesn't mean anything to most people. And it's very difficult to see is that expensive? Is it cheap? How does it compare to other prices? It's very difficult. So my recommendation is if you're doing retail of Bitcoin, if you're accepting Bitcoin payments, trying to earn Bitcoin through selling a service or product, either through ecommerce or in a physical store, I would recommend that you price all of your products in a currency that your customers are most familiar with. And in Europe, that means euro. In the U.S. it means U.S. dollars, whatever that may be.

How to charge in bitcoin

And then, on checkout, when people arrive at their shopping cart and select among many payments options that you might have, select to pay with Bitcoin, the systems that support that will convert the price to a Bitcoin price at that moment, and it will keep the exchange rates steady for you, so that your customers can pay a specific Bitcoin amount that corresponds roughly to the price advertised for the product on your store.

BTCPay Server with WordPress's Woo Commerce

I use an open source project to do that called BTC Pay Server, which has very nice integration to a number of ecommerce solutions, such as WordPress is very popular. WooCommerce, Ecommerce Solution, try that. That might be a good solution. (soft music) If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe, like and share. All my work is shared for free. So if you want to support it, join me on Patreon.