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What Would it Look Like to Go Full Crypto?
What would it look like for an individual, or family unit to base their finances completely on cryptocurrency? Using only cryptocurrency to pay for rent, utilities, and food? How would one go about accomplishing this, and what services would they use? It turns out, this is possible to do today. There are more than enough services and infrastructure built up around cryptocurrency payments to deal with facilitating your life. As we will find out, going full crypto might even be a lucrative thing to do.
Everyday Payments
In order to go full crypto, you will need a strategy for spending your cryptocurrency on a day to day basis. This means paying for groceries, gasoline for your car, and extras like hobbies and products. In order for cryptocurrency to go mainstream, everyday merchants and shops will need to accept cryptocurrency in exchange for goods and services. In the early days of cryptocurrency, companies tried to get shops to accept bitcoin for their goods. This presented a challenge, especially for small business owners, due to the high volatility of bitcoin. It was unreasonable to accept bitcoin for goods, when bitcoin could fall by 50% in a single day.
The strategy for everyday payments evolved into letting the consumer spend whatever they like (i.e. cryptocurrency) and have the merchant receive whatever currency they’re expecting. The crypto visa card is the technology that enables this sort of flexibility. The customer and merchant no longer need to agree on the currency used for the exchange. Instead, both the customer and the merchant are free to choose which currency is spent, and received. Most crypto visa cards work just like regular credit cards. They can be swiped at any terminal, and inserted in any ATM. Perfect for everyday payments. The crypto.com visa card will even incentivize you to spend cryptocurrency, by giving you cashback.
Subscriptions
Nowadays, the average individual has 3 active subscriptions. This presents a unique challenge for subscribing with cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrency transactions are difficult, and in some cases impossible to schedule for a future date and time. That is, if you keep your cryptocurrency in your own wallet. However, if you’re using a service that holds your cryptocurrency for you, then paying for subscriptions with cryptocurrency is substantially more simple. We will revert once again back to the crypto visa card. It turns out, that just like with in person payments, the crypto visa card can also be set up to pay for your subscriptions. The crypto.com visa card will actually give you a 100% rebate on your Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon prime memberships.
Paying your Bills
Going full crypto gets quite a bit more difficult when paying for utilities, paying for taxes, and interacting with your bank. Most utility companies have existed for a long time, and thus are used to doing things “the old way”. Because of this, their payment channels are a lot more rigid in terms of the forms of money they are able to accept. If they require cash, cheque, or direct deposit, then going to be challenging. You will need to sell cryptocurrency for government money if you’re committed to going full crypto. However, if the utility provider is set up for credit card payments, then crypto visa cards make this simple.
Your taxes are going to be significantly more complicated if you intend on going full crypto. In some countries such as Canada, sending, receiving, or trading cryptocurrencies are taxable transactions. If all of your finances are done with cryptocurrency, then you will have a lot of transactions that need to be analyzed. The tax agency is looking to determine whether or not you’ve made capital gains off of your investments. Depending on your situation, you may owe tax agency money. Unless you live in the state of Ohio (where you can pay taxes in bitcoin), then you will have to sell some cryptocurrency in order to pay your government.
Banking with Cryptocurrency
By now, we have all heard stories about how bank accounts have been flagged because of cryptocurrency related transactions. For good reason too, cryptocurrency fundamentally undermines the business model of banks by allowing people to directly own their money. Hopefully, if you went full crypto, you wouldn’t need a bank account. No more arbitrary fees, no more wait times, or needing to go into a branch to sign documents. The reason why we need banks is fading. It used to be the case that you needed a bank for a loan, for investments, or for safe storage of funds. All of this can be done within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The portion of the cryptocurrency industry that offers bank-like services is known as DeFi, or Decentralized Finance.
Getting Paid
Up until now, we’ve been talking exclusively about how to spend cryptocurrency. What about when you get paid in your government currency? It is important that if you go full crypto, you have a seamless crypto onboarding plan. You don’t want to be spending 5% of your money to convert your hard earned cash into crypto. Furthermore, if you’re converting your pay cheque into cryptocurrency on a semi-monthly basis, you’re bound to attract unwanted attention from your bank. It is far better to use a service that will automatically convert your pay cheque into crypto. If you want to go one step further, you can ask your employer to pay you with bitcoin or cryptocurrency.
A Safe and Balanced Portfolio
If you’re going to go full crypto, it is best to balance your portfolio. A safe and balanced portfolio will contain some amount of stablecoin. This is what you would likely be drawing from if you’re spending from a crypto visa card. Due to the volatility of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, you probably don’t want to be spending them. Spending your stablecoins will give you a financial experience most similar to the one you’re used to having with your bank. Spending bitcoin will have you second guessing your purchases and doing foreign currency conversion in your head all day long.
There are several reasons why someone might want to go full crypto. Whether that is to avoid the pains of dealing with banks, or to get the upside of investing in a new and exciting technology. Regardless of the reasons, the point is, going full crypto is completely possible right now.