codelitt

Noooo! Nice catch. No SSL on the blog, but looks like the link takes you there. Will make a quick fix in a few. http://blog.keepupdated.co should work for now.

Very much so. Seeing my user name populated in the bottom task bar was a little unnerving.

I'm getting timeout errors too. Rather than just "more dynos," on Heroku - you may want to try:

- Adding caching static assets/images/etc (Not sure how this is done on Heroku but fairly straight forward with Nginx or Apache). Currently, your assets are taking a full 6 seconds to serve.

- Possibly serving your static homepage etc from one server/Heroku instance and your functional app from another so you don't put the stress of traffic on a homepage on the app server as well.

Edit: Adding this link to be a bit more helpful. https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/http-caching-ruby-rail...

That's interesting. You'd be interested in seeing employers receive payment from customers that's allocated/split? Or can you expand on that a bit? Feel free to email me at cody [at] incoin.io if you'd like to discuss more.

Right. But with our system, the employee's wage/salary is entered as USD. We purchase BTC at the time that payroll is ran at the current price.

So assuming that the employee isn't going to spend it and that BTC is forever increasing in value over time - the employer isn't giving away a valuing asset because they purchased it and gave it away within a few moments while the employee gets the benefit of a valuing asset. I don't think anyone would complain about that.

Awesome and thanks for the heads up. We noticed it a while back and it got lost in the shuffle. We really should get that fixed though.

I don't know quite what you are referring to. Giving away shares of stock in any public company could possibly be compared to it because they're liquid like BTC is. BUT I don't see it as being similar to giving away shares of a private company which are not very liquid.

The risk of getting paid in BTC does exist as far as price volatility, but it's not a far cry away from being paid in cash being as it's liquid and many merchants accept it as payment.

Hey guys! We saw that the other day when we checked out your platform. I was referring more to how the settings are updated. It just felt like it was all up to the employer. Where everything is controlled by employee only on Incoin. Personal preference I guess.

Also great little tidbit of information!

We don't have taxes quite yet, but we do the same with only handling Bitcoin/ACH deposits post tax.

Thanks for dropping in and the support.

We'll get in touch to discuss further for sure!

We do have measures in place to protect ourselves and we appreciate your comments. There's always more that we can do.

It's also worth noting that an employer and employee have given all of the normal KYC information and have connected bank accounts so while the BTC wallet is "anonymous" on the network, we can link it to a specific person. The danger is near the same level as someone getting the money via ACH and immediately withdrawing in cash. (Many banks immediately mark the deposit as not-pending).

I'm not saying that there's not risk. Just that the risks are fairly similar even though the network is different.

Also I think what Tony was saying about debits only company side, is that we're only debiting company accounts which does decrease the fraud level vs a situation where we allowed an a personal account to be debited and money sent somewhere.

Hey! I didn't know that you guys had splits! I stand corrected on that account. And apologies for the misrepresentation. We even signed up for your service when we were doing our research. Was this recent?

You're right about some states having certain laws around this. One of the biggest challenges of working in the US is that every state has a different money transmitting policy and every state has different labour laws.

We hope that even if we step on some toes, that we can move this forward. There are some incredibly cool concepts in how people get paid that Bitcoin could enable. We talked a bit about areas in the Bitcoin ecosystem and payroll in general we think we can push things forward in our launch post: http://blog.incoin.io/introducing-incoin-bitcoin-distributed...

I get what you mean.

Impressive. What kind of tools do you guys have in the works? How is the compliance toolkit working out?

Thanks! We're not nearly where you are though. :)

We have a couple of things in place. When an employer is running payroll: they have 2 points to review (both employee and their payroll as a whole) the totals in USD, 2FA step, and then there's a countdown before payroll begins to run (which they can opt to rush if they so decide).

We have policies and tech in place to make sure that when we're distributing we can guarantee that payouts happen as we expect.

Fraud/risk - Bitcoin itself doesn't increase our fraud/risk. We follow a KYC process for all of the companies and employees on our platform. These are companies paying employees. These companies and employees are liable for their payroll taxes and income taxes and keep records of this for them. The employees themselves are responsible for maintaining their Bitcoin wallets. We verify that a wallet has a real address, but the risk for losing money forever if they enter the wrong address is the same as if they were transferring from one of their wallets to another using any other Bitcoin service.

Amazing answer and awesome link. That would be a massive boon. What startup do you work for?

Thank you for the support! And thank you for your feedback.

We do have some stuff that ZenPayroll currently doesn't have such as the btc (which you mentioned) and our paycheck distribution which allows for employees to automatically take their paycheck into any number of bank accounts/bitcoin wallets.

RE integration: Yes. We realize that the taxes is a huge part. Currently we're offering a free month and plan to have tax deductions integrated before actually charging customers. You'll notice now, there isn't even a spot to enter your billing details for using the service. It's currently free.

The other stuff you mentioned is in our roadmap. We're just getting started and plan to add much more.

You're absolutely correct. It will be difficult for them. It will be even more difficult depending if they've just purchased the coin or have held it for a while.

You're right. We understand that and are offering our beta customers help doing the tax portion of things. We still have a lot to do, but we're just getting started!

You're right. We should probably put our profiles up. We get busy with product(s) and we tend to not focus on talking about ourselves as much as we probably should. We're admittedly not the best at marketing or PR. We'll put some stuff up soon.

RE security - we don't actually hold any bitcoin and our ACH provider handles transactions; we're trying to steer clear of all major security issues by avoidance. We've put a lot of effort into securing any data we do have, though, and we've also got a great compliance and legal team working with us for the finance issues

We've chatted with the Bitwage guys. Good guys. We respect what they're doing.

Well there are a few differences currently, and even more coming over the next month - 2 months. But the ones that are currently available:

1. Interface. If you use the two product side by side, I think you'll see the difference.

2. Automation. Currently Bitwage (as I understand it. I could be wrong) handles ACH and Bitcoin transactions manually. Our platform is a little further along. Although they did get their MVP out before ours because of this so props to them!

3. Employee control. Our platform relies on employees to control the majority of their information which provides several benefits but mostly ease of use for the employer and freedom for the employee to update their settings and how they're paid right up to the moment that the distribution daemon fires up.

4. Wage splitting. Employees can get their paycheck into several checking accounts, savings accounts, investment accounts, and Bitcoin wallets.

5. Reporting. Our reporting for both an employer and employee is a bit more robust in our minds and takes into account that people getting paid in BTC will now have capital gains considerations.

It does have some similarities, but we put the majority of the control in the employees' hands. This not only makes the employer's lives easier, but also allows the employee to update how their paid at any point in time.

This is of course empty until it's fulfilled, but for what it's worth - we have a lot in our roadmap that will also set this apart in a lot of ways.

Hey! Cody from Incoin here. It would be rad and it's in our roadmap. Employers currently do fund payroll in USD, but we're working on adding the ability to fund payroll in BTC. And you're absolutely correct. We would save in fees in a number of places, namely avoiding using our ACH provider.

Very true. That's why we offer employees the option choose what percentage of their paycheck to receive in BTC and USD (hope to add other currencies soon). The idea isn't to get paid in BTC and then to exchange it. We're idealists, but the idea is to get paid in BTC and use it!

With our system you will just pay one fee to accomplish your end goal. The ACH debit and BTC transaction fee doesn't cost you any more. It should eliminate the 3-8% on exchanges for foreign currency, the wire transfer fees, and the BTC exchange fee. You'll just have one instead of 3. We're working to price it competitively.

Thanks for the support. And you're correct. We answered a bit about us. We're going to start simply with 1-3 states and then build out as we go.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916812

You're absolutely correct. Part of our need to build this was to enable employees to have reporting for the BTC/USD price when they were paid in it vs. when they sell. The idea is for them to make their lives more simple in this regard.

We want to add other coins for sure. We're going to get BTC right during the beta and then start adding other coins as we go. Maybe we could open up voting.

We're using this internally right now, and that's a risk we wanted to mitigate for ourselves. Pretty sure that no-one wants to assume this risk.

The companies that use our service don't own or transact in Bitcoin. Wages are specified and debited in USD — we then purchase Bitcoin and transfer it to the employees. This effectively mitigates any risk from the companies.

For employees our main feature right now is that they can manage how much they want in Bitcoin/USD — every month — and manage the risks themselves. Also, one of our employees requested an "average bitcoin price", which helps to mitigate any risk on the employees side (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7916822)

Extremely valid concerns.

We're trying to be as secure as possible — personal data is strongly encrypted in our database, we're using tokens instead of bank details to keep things more secure, we're implementing 2FA for logins, and we're using perfect forward security for SSL.

Unfortunately, though, money laundering law mandates that we need to record personal information so there's little we can do to get around the name <=> bitcoin address issue. We have ideas (like company-specific encryption for bitcoin addresses where only employers can decrypt addresses) but it's a long way out, even if we do implement it.

Unfortunately not right now. We're looking at this from a startup's point of view, and putting our SaaS code on github isn't something we're looking ATM. We will be work on releasing an API for others to use.

That's a great question — and that is one of the first issues (alongside bitcoin) that we want to get right.

Garnishments, withholdings, and taxes vary state to state, and sometimes city by city. We're working with our tax lawyers and accountants to make this all seamless, but it's a real pain. We're looking to launch in potentially three states at first — just to make things easy.

Right now the reporting and payments are manual — we notify the company how much is owed in taxes etc. and they must pay the government themselves.

We're looking to simplify this further, though, and debit the money for garnishments to pay the government on behalf of employers where possible.

This. Also it simplifies things. If you get paid in USD, then you still pay the transfer fees to get bitcoin. It's more manual than just receiving part or all of your paycheck in BTC every month.