You clearly haven't bothered to learn about their service:
"To calculate the exchange rate for US Dollars, we pull up-to-the-minute BID prices from three exchanges. We take the 2 that are closest together and toss out the third, so that a bad feed from one exchange will not affect our calculation. Of the 2 rates that remain, Bit-Pay uses the highest BID price as our exchange rate. "
Companies don't end up changing prices every minute. Gas stations, for example, are prohibited from changing prices too frequently in many states.
A proper solution has to provide more than one minute of price stability. BitPay doesn't provide longer term price stability.
i highly recommend all of these:
- "Cathedral and the Bazaar"
- "Buddhism Without Beliefs"
- "Mindfulness in Plain English"
- "Godel Escher Bach"
- "People's History of the United States"
- "Debian Administrator's Handbook"
For those interested in sustaining themselves by making open / libre software, I plan on dedicating my next summer to starting a cooperative for hackers. The basic idea is that if we can create a decentralized ecosystem for exchanging currency, ideas, and goods in an open and cooperative manner, we can solve our needs as hackers without resorting to non-free alternatives. You can find my early planning here: https://github.com/SirDinosaur/hackercoop, and I'd greatly appreciate any questions, comments, critiques on how to make my / our dream possible.
In the UK: Taxes are complicated but mostly solved. Either your employers deduct taxes before you get your money or you are self-employed and pay an accountant to sort it out; and people you buy things from add taxes before you buy stuff. If you are rich you get an accountant and practice various forms of avoidance (legal, but those loopholes may close soon, and of dubious ethicality) to evasion (not legal).
Missing from the above description are people involved in barter economies. There are several barter economy systems in the UK. The UK tax collectors (HM Revenue and Customs) are clear: barter trades can be taxable.
Suggestion: Find an accountant that would like to work as part of a co-operative. The collective either has one big joint account (like a business) or lots of individual accounts - either way good accounting will legally minimise tax burden and help with other stuff.
Awesome, thanks for the suggestion. Do you suppose the accounting could also be automated, with help from an accountant, as part of the system that facilitates exchanges? My current thinking is to create a system that can be used by anyone, not just those within a single collective.
