If you live in Australia, you can use Bitcoin to buy food, transfer money or pay for a co-working space. In the following article, CoinJar covers the stories from businesses that are successfully integrating this popular cryptocurrency.
Although it has a blurry background story which seems to be a promising substitution in the financial system and sparking off other cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin, Bitcoin still has problems to move beyond a currency for speculation into a currency for daily use. The main reason is because merchants need to use Bitcoins, so it will go mainstream. Unfortunately, for now, there is not enough encouragements for them to do so.
Moreover, CoinJar, an Australian Bitcoin platform, has conducted interviews with four major individuals from distinctively different fields, from the agriculture industry to a web hosting company. One thing these Australians share in common is that they incorporate Bitcoin in their businesses.
Whether it’s for fun, the technology, the functionality or the philosophy behind Bitcoin; cryptocurrency is growing. CoinJar’s aforementioned compiled stories of businesses integrating Bitcoin coincide with the launch of its new website.
Meet The Men Of The Game
Chris, the owner of Earth and Sky Organics, a Australian agriculture firm that delivers freshly certified organic and biodynamic products, shared that he uses Bitcoins in his food delivery business and is building a decentralised peer-to-peer financing platform to support farmers in Australia. He said, “I read somewhere that Bitcoin wouldn’t be a real currency until people could purchase food with it. We sell food, so we sell food with Bitcoin.”
The Chief Edge Officer at Deloitte, Pete Williams said that Bitcoin could be the future of exchanging value. Different countries have different restrictions around movement of value or cash. Pete also believes that the world is much more global now as opposed to the old world being divided by maps. “In this digital world, maps don’t have a role. It’s this virtual connectivity. I think that having the ability to move money around to whom and how you choose is something that is very democratising,” he said.
Nhial Majok, the CEO of TagPesa, is an expatriate from East Africa who is using Bitcoin to help people in the community save on fees when sending money back home. Because Bitcoins cannot be kept in the country under normal monetary regulation by the government, a decentralised currency may be more useful in sending funds directly to the needy without intervention from bureaucrats.
Another story came from Nick Jaffe, the developer of co-working and web-hosting company Electron Workshop. He said that the company started accepting Bitcoin as payments as he found that it was an interesting network. He started accepting it for fun, and now the firm has a handful of customers that pay with it.
“CoinJar is at the forefront of Australia’s growing Bitcoin community,” said Cade Diehm, CoinJar’s Creative Director, “We believe we have a responsibility to celebrate and champion the human stories of this exciting technology.”