Why are they so cheap?

Google for "reverse bitpay" and you'll see requests for this that exist going back nearly 10 years. So based on that, the reason this doesn't exist is certainly because the payment card industry doesn't allow a merchant payments platform to do this. At least not at retail / point-of-sale.

As far as for the freelancer / consultant use case, there are billing services from BitWage and Deel, where your clients pay with bank transfer or maybe even payyourment card, and then the billing service converts that to bitcoin and you get the bitcoin.

There's also where, for its users in the U.S., Cash App provides a bank account for direct deposit from an employer. Since the payment network for banks in the U.S. (ACH) is "pull" only (at least for general retail bank customers), this might not work for most of your clients. But if all they need is your bank routing number and account number, then they can pay to the bank account number that Cash App provides to you.

Ultimately, the better method (for you) is to suggest that your clients onboard with a service like Strike, or Cash App, or an exchange, and then they can acquire bitcoin themselves with which they use to pay your invoices.

This is hard to do, especially in a non-custodial, non-KYC way. OpenNode is beta-testing a plugin that auto-converts fiat payments through Stripe into BTC, so when that's released you could do that with Zaprite. Or right now you could connect a Strike account (if you have one) and then simply buy BTC as soon as the USD lands in your account. We're also exploring connections with Exchanges which will could do this for you automatically.

Super bullish

It's an interesting idea, but I think it'd discourage spending rather than encourage it. Currently we attempt to encourage spending by rewarding users more when they tip larger amounts to good stories ... which should incentivize spending while not forcing them to.

Imagine, the price of beef was now 300x more expensive. You'd buy chicken.

It doesn't need a blockchain. Blockchain's utility is decentralized, global consensus of event ordering.

I don't see why you'd need that for social media. What you need is something more like a relay system, i.e. a large, permissive mempool-like system. That is, not strict consensus, merely high availability and discovery.

One of my favorite things to do on SN that I think few users yet do is go to /top/comments/day and find under-loved comments.

Was woken up at 3am by the PartyBnB again. Managed to get back to sleep for a few hours after yelling at them.

Going to write the Saturday Newsletter, then hopefully get some coding in.

🙏

Tʀᴀɴsʟᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ʙʏ ᴅᴜᴄᴋᴅᴜᴄᴋɢᴏ

Awesome, hf

Don't forget to tell them about SN