Meet Olaf Carlson-Wee – The Person Who Chose Bitcoin As His Primary Form Of Money

Olaf Carlson-Wee, the Head of Risk at Bitcoin company Coinbase, was the first hire at the company. He opted to get paid in the digital currency at a time when not many people understood or were even aware of what bitcoin really is.

In conversation with Laura Shin of Forbes, Carlson-Wee spoke about how he has been living, as much as he can, on the digital currency for almost three years now.

He said that at the time when he decided to get his salary in bitcoin, “most of the world had never even heard of it, let alone understood it, so I had a huge opportunity to hoard Bitcoin and speculate on the value.” Bitcoin was so little known, he says, it was hard for him to explain to his friends and relatives “what I even did.”

Carlson-Wee failed to negotiate his salary at a fixed amount of Bitcoin. “This turned out for the best as it would likely have nearly bankrupted the company,” he wrote in his initial email. He instead receives a dollar-denominated salary, converted to Bitcoin at the time of payment.

He puts forward an interesting reply when asked why he wanted to get paid bitcoin so badly. He said, “Now, my reasons for wanting to be paid in Bitcoin are two-part. One half is speculative. I think the technology will get bigger and the price of Bitcoin will go up, so I’m speculating to increase my purchasing power. But I don’t intend to sell the Bitcoin. I intend to hold it until there’s a day where I can just use Bitcoin completely. This is a meme in the community — that the day you want to sell your Bitcoin, you won’t have to”.

He chooses to use it as his primary form of money because, he said by phone, “I view Bitcoin as the more democratic version of money and value transfer, because no one controls it…. I expect the Internet to be around longer than any nation-state, so a nation-state-backed currency is actually less safe than an Internet currency in my mind.”

Regarding paying for expenses, Carlson-Wee explained Coinbase’s recently launched Shift debit card, which allows spending Bitcoin anywhere that merchants accept cards. The merchant does not see Bitcoin, Shift sells a customer’s Bitcoin and pays that merchant in dollars. He also noted that more and more merchants are now accepting the digital currency, for example, Overstock.

“It’s pretty easy to buy things online. The hardest part is everyday expenses like food and gas. I’ve always had to cash out some percentage of my salary to dollars. But now I can use the Shift card, which is a hack, but at least I sell less Bitcoin”, he added.

However, he admitted that paying taxes have been complicated. He explained, “Every single time I spend a Bitcoin it’s a taxable event. It’s like I bought and sold an asset. It counts as an investment, with a short- or long-term capital gain or loss…Coinbase gives you a report with your net over the whole year, and I give that to my accountant. If my accountant didn’t know what Bitcoin is, they would say, ‘You’re a high-frequency trader.’ Because every transaction is a capital gain or loss, it’s as if I was doing trades every day in the stock market.”