Topic: Accepting Bitcoin for sales in a volatile market. (Read 374 times)

Just to reconfirm my sales payment policy. I am only prepared to accept Bitcoin, and gold Sovereigns or Britannias. The gold coins are a different problem, and would entail personal meetings, so that is an unlikely method, and outside the scope of this board.

I'm swopping one long term investment for another by accepting Bitcoin,and that is why the current price is less important to me than the price in one years time. Obviously the current price of Bitcoin will be a prime consideration for the buyer, and that is the root of the problem when advertising BIN prices.

The sales of your business, in short, will be turned into Bitcoin investment. The question is, are you willing to put all of your sales in an investment? We are talking about bitcoin, so how your profit would be at risk the moment a payment recieved in the form of crypto. But given the circumstances this market is having, anx if the problem is the pricing, I'd suggest having a fixed price (fiat based; e. g. $5k amount of it) to promote fairness because the price of Bitcoin moves up and down and other people will hesitate to invest if it would be a fixed amount, when the market price of Bitcoin is high.

Why is the adoption of Bitcoin so slow and there are still few merchants that accept Bitcoin payments. Because the price of
Bitcoin is volatile, most sellers are afraid of losing money if the Bitcoin price dumps suddenly. But in my opinion, sellers can
use a converter app, every time we receive a Bitcoin payment, we immediately transfer the Bitcoin to fiat. Such a strategy
has been shown to be effective for some merchants.

I'm not afraid of losing money. If you are indulging in speculative ventures, then you have to accept that you will have some losses. However, if your losses exceed your gains, then you need to do something else.
Very few people seem to understand virtual assets, and this includes Bitcoin and domain names. I believe that Bitcoin is the only crypto that is a hard asset, but not many people seem to be able to justify that comment, and they would include several of the alts as hard assets - I don't think this is true. Because of this, and the volatility of Bitcoin, I try to estimate its value in a year's time, and I use this for my personal calculations. I will almost certainly be wrong in my estimate, so I can't base a current sale price on this estimate, as buyers would be unlikely to agree with me. I want to avoid mentions of local currencies completely, as they have their own levels of volatility. The best solution seems to be to include a link to a currency converter such as xe.com, and allow the user to make his own calculation.

Domain names are an interesting investment. Each one is unique, and a good descriptive name can be a nice traffic magnet for a business. Alternatively, a start up company can take a simple non-dictionary word, and build value by branding it. Ebay is an example of this. The domain name must be worth millions now, but when they picked it up, it was probably only worth the registration fee. Selling names like this is selling dreams, and you have to find the right dreamer, and feed his imagination. This means that to a certain extent, it is a seller's market, but you have to make it easy for a buyer to contact you, and to pay for the name.

Escrow is a bit of a problem if it is required. The domain industry has nearly as many thefts and frauds as are associated with Bitcoin. A name that is transferred via a registrar push can be reversed, but it is far harder to reverse a registrar transfer. There are several honest and reputable members here who offer escrow services, but they may not be known outside the forum. An alternative might be to use my Jet Cash account to establish credibility. I own the domain JetCash.com, so the account plus domain should have a reasonable value - possible into $xx,xxx. Godaddy values the name at $6,750, and that could be low. Couple that with some other names such as Baronets.com - $1,462, and BuyAny.com - $3,646, and it is obvious that I would be mad to throw those away for a few thousand pound fraud.

I think if you are afraid of losing money, it is better not to deal with cryptocurrencies at all, because trading is almost always associated with losses of serious amounts. If you want to make good money, then be prepared to lose more. Experience is not earned just like that - only through difficulties, pain and loss.

Either you have cushion of funds to not be afraid of volatility of Bitcoin or you convert immediately.
This way you take risk only if you are able to or you don't.
So this is not something to be afraid of.

You can believe in Bitcoin or not OP.

Option 1 - believer. You price your domans according to today's prices and if Bitcoin takes a small dive like 10% you don't care and keep holding. If it takes a big dive you adjust the prices.

Option 2 - non-believer. Use a payment processor to transact for you and sell your coins for fiat every time someone makes a purchase. Adjust prices daily.

Put the price of your product in dollars, and the conversion to BTC will be automatically using many softwares such as btcpayserver.org

If you are worried about holding bitcoin due to it volatility, just create an account in a reputable exchange such as coinbase and sell the bitcoin as soon as you receive them. Not much of a problem.

Bitcoin can be just a new payment method, cheaper than paypal

Well I think that's the problem coz bitcoin is pretty volatile, billing in bitcoin is difficult and risky for both end parties, especially when the bitcoin price moves high in just an hour after you sent your client a billing notice. Still a NO for me.

Fixed price with bitcoin? I guess there will be no people that will get interested paying that pricing method. It is better to have  a fixed local currency, and converted into bitcoin than the other way around.

You will have to deal with the risk. You can't charge users extra because they are paying in bitcoin and the price is volatile. You will instead lose users and others won't be willing to pay you with bitcoin when see the price difference when paying with fiat.
You can use payment gateways that will allow users to pay with bitcoin but you will receive in fiat (you have to pay a small fee), since you don't want to take risks with volatility. But, if you don't want to convert it into fiat, then you can update price in realtime.
You can suggest them where to buy but make sure you tell them there might be better places to buy from.

Your dilemma is the same with all entrepreneurs across the globe. For me, if you are service provider, then billing in btc should not be a problem because so far you can factor in the volatility to the price but be also careful not to drive your clients away because of the risk you want to take and they can get it elsewhere. For an entrepreneur who sells physical goods, the only way you tend to make headway is if you buy your goods in btc and the price is fixed in btc irrespective of the equivalent in $.

I think if you can get a system that will automatically be converting the amount of dollars in USD to BTC, that will be better. And you shouldn’t be listing the prices in BTC, example: 0.6 BTC like you have said, it would be better that you just list the prices in USD as that is what people will understand better than the BTC. And like I have said at first, if there can be a system or way that you can configure your website to convert those amounts to BTC so that your buyers will know how much of BTC they are meant to be sending to your address. I have seen sites that are doing that, you should do research.

I have also heard about Blockchain merchant app, but I don’t know how it works, you should probably look into it and other crypto merchant apps, they might have what you need.

The unsold name price is an interesting one. My first reaction is to state that prices will be reviewed on the first of the month, and may increase with a drop in the value of Bitcoin. That leaves me with an unstated option to decrease the priceif Bitcoin drops. It couls also provide a stimulus for a potential customer to arrive at an early buy decision. There is also the problem of holding a price for a few days whilst the transfer is completed. If Bitcoin makes a hockey stick movement, this could be a problem. Maybe I should restrict the offer to 3 days maximum. If the price drops, then I don't mind taking the notional loss, as I believe that Bitcoin will soon recover after such a drop. The bigger risk is the buyer dropping out if he hasn't picked up the Bitcoin in time. There isn't much I can do about that though. The margins are brilliant, and give a lot f room for negotiation. If you pick up a name for $8, and renew it a couple of times, then you are in the hole for less than $25. Selling it for $2,500 gives you a comfortable cushion.

The link might be broken, won't direct me to the thread.

Anyway, I think OP's business is not big enough to use a payment processor or a third party service, enough knowledge on bitcoin volatility would probably make him minimize the risk, and of course he can do it manually by trading on stable coins at the end of the day, or any period he likes too, besides volatility does not only mean you lose, you could also win on it, especially if the market is bullish.

Apologies in advance for the length of my post.

If you believe the negotiation will take a long time, you either accept the price no matter what the USD pair is or you have to link the BTC price to USD one way or another. I get what you're trying to do, and I admire you for it, but this is your profit and credibility at stake. While I might not want to negotiate a price of 0.6BTC in a matter of months when BTC/USD could be growing at a fast pace, you wouldn't want that to happen to you either. As stompix said, this is a situation where both parties risk having the other back out from the deal.

That's where I guess you want to decide what you want more: BTC or fiat value? The thing is, it's quite risky to have a 0.6BTC customer back out .. if say Bitcoin's USD value doubles, then you would have to put the domain on sale again, this time for half the price.. and that is 0.3BTC.

So yeah, this is a very sensitive subject.. and a double edged sword. You should also consider the other side of the story, as to me it seems like you're thinking one step ahead: you're missing the first step.. finding a customer. You might not have a customer at all for a matter of months or years. In that case, if Bitcoin doubles in the meantime, are you going to keep the same 0.6BTC price or will you cut it in half? This is where we go back to the bolded question above..

Now about recommending wallets/exchanges or giving information about BTC, it depends. If you start giving out information, the customer might expect you to explain and answer questions they may have. Not giving any kind of info may also be wrong, as you might have a customer who really wants to pay you and get the domain but backs out because they're uncertain about using BTC. So it might be the best to go right in between the two.. find some handy links that explain any questions they may have (say a BTC F.A.Q. or a how-to for Electrum, etc) and hand them out whenever a customer is in doubts.

Again, sorry for the length of my post. I really hope I have helped with your concerns; anyway, best of luck with your business.

I don't want to use a payment processor, as I'm a Bitcoin purist, and I belive it is a P2P settlement system. I don't believe it will become a currency, and this is why I hope it doesn't debase itself by becoming a supermarket payment option.  Gold Britannias and Sovereigns are legal tender in Britain, but I've never heard of anyone trying to spend one in a supermarket. Bitcoin is money and a medium of exchange, and it is also a virtual asset. This means it is ideal for settlement in the purchase of virtual assets, and should not require the intervention of banks or quasi-banks. I don't care how the purchaser acquired his coins, he could be a miner, a HODLer, and inheritor. or have earnt or purchased the coins.

I've got several trading sites on my own domains, and one even has a ticketing system and an out of date blog. I use xe.com to show current exchange rates. I use this as it is a more general forex site, and possibly more trusted by the public than a crypto site.

If you don't want to mention fiat at all, nor do you want a thrid party payments gateway, then set up a small website and put the price though blockchain's API:
https://www.blockchain.com/api/exchange_rates_api
For example:
https://blockchain.info/tobtc?currency=GBP&value=5000

Even if the price goes from 0.6 to 1.2 or 0.3 you can be sure that the buyer will always make the BTC<>fiat math in is head, we all do
This is for the case you want that person to know at each time what the value of the website is in BTC without you having to do the maths each day, but if you're negotiating through email for weeks, maybe months, what you're planning on doing will turn into a headache for the customer, and maybe for you too.



He is concerned that he will start negotiation at 1 BTC for example as he values the domain at 11k and by the time all the deal is getting done which might take a few weeks the prices would have changed and he needs to tell the client the prices has gone up to 2 BTC as BTC dropped to 5k or the client will get out of the deal since 1 BTC is worth now 50k.

I think the best option is to have a crypto payment processor. There is one good thread about it that maybe can help the OP to decided in the future, Bitcoin Payment Processors. Volatility will also be present in crypto, it's just how you are going to manage or mitigate it.

I'm not bothered by volatility on my own account. I value the domain name on my anticipation of the Bitcoin value in six months time. That is completely speculative and very subjective, and I wouldn't want to enter into discussions about that with people other than long term Bitcoiners.

I want to completely avoid any contact with fiat for tax purposes. Tax will be paid when I dispose of my Bitcoin. I believe that I am able to obtain roll over relief for virtual asset exchanges, but don't trust me with this opinion, you should seek your own tax advice for the laws in your country.

My ideal sale would be the receipt of a Bitcoin payment directly into the wallet associated with my node. This would be followed by a registrar push with Name Silo. This may be an optimistic ambition, and there could be a number of variations on this. I'm a senior member on a variety of forums - I'm a VIP and a domain insider on Name Pros, and I have over 5,000 likes, and I've been a member since 2016. I've been here for several years, and my Jet Cash profile is available for all to see. I'm a legendary, a DT1, and a merit source, and I hope that this will generate dome trust. Either forum account is probably worth more than most individual names that I will be selling.

The volatility is probably of more importance to a buyer, and I toyed with the idea of explaining how he could reduce his costs by riding the wicks on Coinbase pro, but that may create more confusion for a newcomer to Bitcoin.

Domain names are unique, and they seem to be increasing in value. This is so as a result of the lockdowns, and the housing repossessions, and my RV and campervan names seem to have increased in value, as more people seek to purchase these vehicles as homes or alternative holiday accommodation. This makes them a sellers market if they are decent names.

Why should volatility be problem?If you are so afraid of the Bitcoin price fluctuations,than why not just sell your bitcoins for fiat,right after the buyer pays you with BTC for the domain name(after 3 confirmations).
If you ask me,BTC price volatility won't be your main problem.Your main problem will be finding buyers that are willing to pay for a domain name by using Bitcoin.
By the way,do you plan to use a crypto payment processor,like Bitpay or Coinpayments?