Topic: Can Bitcoin help to balance salaries across the world? - page 3. (Read 888 times)

Even if bitcoin is highly volatile, I don't think we should consider using USDT over it if any crypto currency is ever going to be used for global salary scale balancing.
 
It's better to be paid in bitcoin, and the payment is being calculated not just by bitcoin value or price, but the salary will be scaled by units of bitcoin. What the price might be at that time should not matter.
 
Let's not forget that USDT is a centralised asset that is controlled, adding to the fact that if anything happens to the issuer, it can be depegged and its value could drop to zero.

It's not possible. Wages have to be measured and defined taking the local reality of each country and region due to living costs being different in each environment. If we had a global default wage for every graphic designers, for an example, it would be totally benefical for the ones living in third world countries, but heavily detrimental to the ones living in first world countries, considering the costs they pay to live there are much superior.

An example of that we can already notice right now are the signature campaigns. For someone living in USA or UK, the income they make from signature campaign on this forum is only an extra minor income compared to their total monthly budget, while someone from India or Venezuela engaged in the same activity can make a relatively comfortable living from it.

Moreover, to define wages artificially doesn't sound an efficient idea to fix the issue of underpaid employees. The market works around the supply and demand law, and that is what we have to keep in mind when choosing what we are going to work with. That is, to work in a demanded niche, which doesn't have enough supply of labor force yet.

No possible.
Bitcoin is yet to reach the underserved communities in Africa. The technology around it cannot be understood by the folks who live there and there are too many barriers from the technology to the enabling environment and then policies. Even in those communities the use of fiat is not something they are used to. Some places even still use the trade by barter system. This is why I say, the despite the possibilities of Bitcoin in balancing salaries, these barriers to it must be overcome first.

1.Any ideas on how to make the Bitcoin price more stable?

2.What exactly are you proposing? The creation of a freelance platform, where the freelancers are paid in BTC only?
I remember several crypto freelance platforms being built in the last several years and none of them became the new Fiverr or Upwork.

3.Bitcoin is "digital gold", which makes the whole idea of spending BTC for goods and services(even labor costs) kinda difficult for implementation.

4.Bitcoin cannot magically "equalize" the salaries across the world. The process of equalizing the level of labor productivity can equalize the salaries. Another thing is the overall cost of living. People in some underdeveloped countries could live with 300 USD per month, while it's impossible for an American to live with 300 USD per month in the USA. That's why many programmers from Asia and Africa can offer cheap online services. Maybe equalizing the cost of living could equalize the salaries.

I'm gonna have to disappoint you. Bitcoin is not a “magic wand” that “saves you from all your troubles”. It's just another tool. I've already heard many fantasies about “bitcoin will save the economy”.... But as soon as we move away from fantasies, and start applying bitcoin to the real world, the real economy, real processes - everyone realizes that it is not realizable.

It's the same with wages. The idea is beautiful, but utopian. Just try to apply your idea for today's real world, such as it is, and you will very soon realize that it is unrealistic.... At least start with the fact that wages form the cost of production and try to make this process universal for the whole world, for different countries, different economies, different standards of living....

The only possible way that this can come  to light is if Bitcoin becomes a legal tender world wide but if it's now, then such can not happen. I believe that the government of every country in the world might not approve for Bitcoin to become a legal tender. Personally, I don't even support for Bitcoin to be used in paying salary if we still have to spend on our needs using fiat money.

Our forum has many jobs that pay in bitcoin, and I think this forum has the most jobs that pay in bitcoin. But at the end of the day, all of those bitcoins before being paid out to people will also be based on the value of USD at that time.

Everyone wishes that one day bitcoin could be used as the world's official currency but honestly, I don't think that will happen. Governments will never accept and use BTC even if USD dominance collapses. There will certainly be another national currency to replace it, bitcoin will never be the choice of governments.

Nope. Not at all. Am a big fan of BTC myself, but its volatility is annoying as hell sometimes which is why its unbalanced nature cannot really be utilised to balance global salaries across the world in my opinion.

On the other hand, USDT could manage to do that since it's almost always stable in nature except for a few crazy hiccups here and there.

Again, the bottom line would be the local prices of goods and services. If the prices of goods and services greatly vary from one country to another, it is next to impossible for salaries to achieve a global standard.

Supposing there are two programmers with the same level of competence. One needs $20 a day for food while the other only needs $2. The latter would be more than happy to offer his/her services for $20/day. The former thinks this is unreasonable. Knowing the reality, employers would definitely hire the latter. The latter, however, cannot easily demand a salary according to a different standard because he/she is dispensable. There may be a handful that companies find worth bidding but the rest could easily be replaced. This is the real world case.

Although I agree that Bitcoin has the potential to unify our sense of value, what's happening right now is the opposite. Bitcoin adjusts to its local fiat equivalent. Unfortunately, Bitcoin advocates cannot insist on 1BTC=1BTC ideology because of so many factors which could be summed up as the fiat standard. For as long as the economy is based on fiat and is locally controlled, there can never be a global standard in prices and therefore in salaries.

I agree that it can help, with the matter of inequality. I've read from some other forums of freelancers that there are clients that do like to bring the contract outside the platform where they work, I guess everyone who works there is familiar with this kind of condition. And then, the clients ask their freelancers to get paid not in USD, not in PayPal, not in any other payment processor but in Bitcoin. The agreement between two parties will rely on the trust that they have for each other, or let's say the trust the freelancer has got to their clients. The only problem here is when the fees have also fluctuated a lot, a client won't afford to pay for the $100 fee when the freelance job is just around $10-$50. From there, that's how they'd start using alternatives like USDT with its cheap networks.

Salaries can be paid in Bitcoins but they will always be calculated in USD at first, that's how the economy works at the moment. There isn't a situation like, the salary of the senior angular developer is 1 Bitcoin a year. It's still in USD and Euros. You already prove what I said but in countries where access to the USD is restricted, mostly access to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are restricted too and on top of that, ISPs control everything in such countries.
Bitcoin is the best international payment method from point A to point Z all around the world where access to the Internet is possible. The usage of Bitcoin is there as a payment method but I don't think salaries will be calculated in it directly, without considering the USD value of Bitcoin.

The idea is a great one and the only thing I see that can counter this your proposal is the economy situation in that country. We have different economy in all countries and that will be the major to play an important role in determining if the unified money paid in bitcoin even when more stable can help to make salary balanced across the world.

Those of higher calibre of work can still get paid higher because of their work professionalism, but if the economy situation of that country does not flow with that paid amount, it’ll destroy the goal of the unified payment in bitcoin. A professional freelancer in the USA when paid same amount as a professional freelancer in Nigeria, the one in Nigeria will see the worth of the money much more than that in the USA. The economy of the country will matter a lot and will obstruct the unified payment if enacted.

I've seen freelancer platforms where the platform may ask for your location, the customers (those paying for work) only see the username and the portfolio - and the things the "workers" pubish about themselves in their profiles of course. There may be several models though.

Of course I'm not in favour of a completely unified salary. But for me for exactly the same work, a relatively similar salary or payment is justified despite the location of the worker. I don't understand what you meant with free housing/longer vacations, as that afaik are mostly benefits of high-salary countries (Europe ranks consistently in the first places when it comes to paid vacations).

Good points. However, I have some hope that these challenges tend to improve. For example, recently Bolivia has relaxed its crypto restrictions a lot, which should drastically improve the access to Bitcoin there.

Of course this is possible. But doing these conversions is not something people regularly do. I think the decision "which price I'm willing to offer to my customers" is influenced heavily by the "sense of value". And if a person from a low-salary country see salaries from people from other countries for the same work in the same currency (in this case, the BTC), then this can increase the "sense of value" they perceive for the task.

I believe this is happening for a long time already. Major companies do have the resources to compare salaries across the world, even if this needs lots of currency conversions. For the workers themselves this is much more difficult. Of course most workers are aware of the inequality, but often without consequences, and a part of the problem in my opinion is that the salary differences are not directly visible (only in some few cases like international freelancing).

I agree about worker protection, this is also a part of the puzzle. Bitcoin can only help with parts of this "balancing" task.

I read this argument a lot, but this changes dramatically if your income is also paid in BTC (in comparison to the situation where you bought the Bitcoins). If you have a steady influx of Bitcoins, then it's also easy to spend them. Transaction fees are of course an issue, thats why we need Lightning and other L2s.

Just the Eurozone is an example that such a "balancing" is happening, although very gradually. My example here would not be Greece, which had a tremendous economic crisis in the 2010s, but the Eastern european countries which adopted the euro like Slovenia, Slovakia or Estonia. The differences between their salaries and the Western European nations like Germany or France were much higher in the 90s and 2000s. Of course the Euro area is special as also the common market policies play a major role in that balancing, and thus also countries like Poland are "balancing up". But I think at least a part of the process can be attributed to the Euro, it's not casual that several countries are currently trying to join that area.

Of course there are many factors in play and the "amount of goods produced" does also impact in the salary level. As I wrote in another answer above I don't think Bitcoin or any other "global currency" can solve the inequality problem by itself.

My theory is that it however could help with some factors. Apart from the "sense of value" issue I mentioned above, I also think previsibility for foreign investment would be a major factor. You just brought up the example of Venezuela, and in Argentina (and other countries with a fastly devaluating currency) the situation is very similar: Many companies which would have invested if the currency was more stable are not doing this due to the "devaluation cost", i.e. constant hedging and possible currency exchange barriers, which impacts in the equation when they calculate the profit they could achieve with the investment. Getting international credit is also perhaps easier with a global currency, as the "devaluation costs" impact in the capability of a country to re-pay debt.

I'm not sure how being global helps address salary inequality. The US dollar isn't a global currency, but it can be obtained through exchange with other fiat currencies. When comparing salaries between Venezuela and the US, you need to consider their gross domestic products. The US produces significantly more per capita than Venezuela. I don't see how their currencies directly contribute to this inequality, aside from each central bank's interest rate policies. (For example, the Venezuelan bolívar is hyperinflated, while the US dollar is not.)

Bitcoin helps by providing a hedge against inflation. The issue isn't just that fiat currencies are limited to their nations' borders, but that people save in currencies that are constantly devaluing. However, while the difference might be less severe by saving in Bitcoin, it will still remain significant because, as I mentioned, not all countries produce at the same level.

I have nothing concerning equality but if we look at this forum for example, there is a reason why some people on this forum don't participate in signature campaigns despite their reputations, their trust and personal relations with the forum founder and campaign managers. The pay rate looks too low to them compare to if they want to used that time to work per hour outside the forum, this is why I'm not sure a balance in salary scale will be difficult globally.

There is always different in payment even in online gigs and freelancing, many tech companies gives priority to some countries and consider there pay because their standards of living are more expensive than others. For example, if I get a company that will pay me to work as a social media handler $1500 a month, I will feel like I have won a jackpot but you can't used that to employ a person living in New York when they have a rent of atleast $2k a month to pay, standard of living and economic difference wouldn't make this feasible in my opinion

This isn't really that much of a big problem because salaries can never be equal everywhere. Look at Euro zone for example, you think people at Greece make the same amount of money as people in Germany does? Of course not, because they are not equal nations and they will never be equal and that's why it's different. If they end up putting something like this in the mix, like let's say there is a magical wand and we got rid of every nations fiat ever, and everyone uses bitcoin, it still means that some nations will have citizens making less, and some nations will make more.

This is why it will not balance it, maybe help a bit, but it will not be possible to balance it. Plus, we need to remember that it's only 21 million at max, when all is mined, plus we are talking about something that's going to get higher results and we are not going to see anything major changing neither because it is going to be tougher. So all in all, we should be warning the situation as much as we possibly could.

Of course this is related to the economic level of the region or country concerned, the economic index is a reference in paying salaries.

Not only is the oppression of some companies also with the level of employee ability needs and make competition, to have a reciprocal price of the performance provided by the employee is different, so this cannot be generalized to get a balanced vision.

I am not sure what prevents us for comparing the salaries in btc now. All you need is to convert said salaries to btc and compare.

And it's not like people who are getting paid small salaries now would paid more with bitcoin. There's no need to pay more if there are no laws protecting those workers and or costs of living are relatively low because there's no real infra that takes money.

If anything, this would just lead to getting paid less, because would you think that project manager would choose to pay more if they easily found an offer from overseas that 1/5th of it? Even when that offer is clearly running an immoral sweatshop. Imho that manager would probably chose slave labour if they get away from it.

Also there's nothing really preventing to pay with bitcoin in countries where USD is restricted or buy bitcoin with your salary, so i am not sure how global adoption of this would change things. Paying salaries with btc would be standard method already if benefits would outweight the negatives.

Governments won't most likely don't want to promote btc as a currency, or replacing / threatening the position of fiat money as they would fear market manipulation affecting their countries and there wouldn't be a way to protect them in crisis situations. Currently they can just print more money to go trough crisis.

It's also not economically sustainable to use BTC as cash, when you benefit more by holding it. Economy/capitalism works best when people consume and don't hoard their money.

Let me remind you the unemployment rate is higher than ever all over the world and it varies from country to country which means people will be ready to do a job for less price assuming the quality is same, so salary is just decided by the demand and supply not really based on the quality of the service or product.

Equality in salary is only possible if every country comes under one governance and there's same minimum wage rule applies for anyone or else we have no way of attaining balance in salaries from different parts of the world.

Well if i think of such an idea as bitcoin as a world currency to create good wages and fight inequality is very alluring. It could set a truly universal standard for equal wages within industries and the freelance industry or digital ones. Should I say in this manner, a wage inequality equilibrium is created by equalizing global wage equilibrium. But we all knew that the high volatility of Bitcoin presently is a major stumbling block to it as a stable payment currency. Wide-scale adoption would require improvement of price stability. Moreover, if Bitcoin is going to replace USD or any other traditional currency, it should be considered that not all the communities can have equal access to cryptocurrency or infrastructure and for that some countries don't even legalize Bitcoin as of today. In spite of bitcoin, has the potential to play a part in inequality if it is going to decrease though practicably a number of challenges need to be addressed to improve it on a higher scale.