Multiple famous athletes have started to get paid in Bitcoin. What this means in actuality is that they are having a third party company convert their salary to bitcoin at the time of the paycheck and send it to them. Is this the same thing?
To be truly paid in Bitcoin in my eyes, you would need to have your contract denominated in Bitcoin. I.e instead of saying "50K USD paid out in Bitcoin throughout the year", it would say "to be paid 1 BTC throughout the year".
There is a clear reason employers wont do this. The employee is essentially asking for 100% of the reward, while splitting the risk with their employer. Consider yourself paying an employee 1BTC per year. The price of Bitcoin drops from 50K to 10K USD. Will that employee keep working? Will they be motivated? More than likely they will try to renegotiate or quit. If the price goes up I doubt they share the spoils. The only people who could have this currently would have to have demand that dwarfs their supply (hint this is why we are starting with professional athletes).
Truth is a stable, but inflating currency is great from the employers perspective. You can give them raises every year, encouraging them, but the overall value stays the same. This is a good recipe to have your employees on a hamster wheel. Constantly perceiving themselves moving forward without actually moving. The nominal amount of money they are receiving is rising, but the real value of what they receive is ambiguously changing every year. Imagine the irony of someone bragging about a pay raise, while also complaining about their rent…the hamster wheel keeps spinning.
Long story short, I don’t expect people to be paid in Bitcoin, unless Bitcoin over takes the dollar as the main unit of account. I think this is a definite possibility, but the outcome is binary. This means I don’t expect it to be 50% of contracts in USD and 50% in Bitcoin. IF this were to happen, it would happen in the blink of an eye and everyone will scramble trying to keep up with what is going on.
A similar event you can compare it to is COVID and WFH. At first it’s a couple of trailblazers, but at a certain point the floodgates open and nearly all white collar jobs went remote. Many thought it would be a couple weeks, here we are over a year later. Side note: I think going back to the office could happen similarly quickly. Humans generally over amplify their current conditions to be the conditions moving forward.
Currently Bitcoin's value is volatile. People may not feel comfortable locking into long term deals. I.e would you accept your salary in BTC today? Would you keep working if it depreciated? Would you sign a lease/mortgage with Bitcoin as the unit of account? 1BTC a year in rent would have changed a lot from March 2020 (~4K USD) to March 2021 (~50K USD).
I don’t know if Bitcoin will overtake USD as unit of account, but I do know that if it happens it will happen faster than people can imagine.
This future exists with either:
A. Continual improvement in Bitcoin
B. Collapse of the dollar
C. some combination of the two (most likely)
Option B looks likely when the Fed says stuff like this->