I see lots of people talking about buying bitcoins, mining bitcoins, but no one spending. Maybe I am getting it wrong, but unless I can get paid with bitcoins, this seems to be pointless in my perspective.
I know how to get paid in bitcoins, but that's not what I am asking, so, as a freelancer sysadmin and developer, where can I get paid in bitcoins? How can I find clients willing to pay me with bitcoins?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Trade
There's enough places to spend your coins and there are job boards where you can advertise your services. Bitcointalk is also a good place check out.
That's because storing, mining, and buying bitcoins present new challenges. However, getting paid in bitcoins is pretty much the same as getting paid in USD, gold, or Ithica Hours; you need to make a service people want.
I don't see people accepting bitcoin exclusively for a long time - Even if 50% of the population is willing to use bitcoin, that's still a significant amount of the market that you're ignoring.
Here's a list I am trying to maintain:
http://www.bitcointrading.com/forum/spend-bitcoins/online-stores-accepting-bitcoins/
Specific types of businesses can use Bitcoin to either reduce processing costs/fees, or improve the ease of service. It also avoids the need for the user to provide credit card or other personal details, which a lot of people are wary of doing.
Satoshidice is a good example. It's very easy to make a bet, as it just requires sending bitcoins to a particular address.
coindl.com is another example, which lets you purchase music (and more) with bitcoins. There's no need to create an account; just make your payment and download the files.
High foreign exchange fees can be reduced by using Bitcoin exchanges to make an intermediate step through Bitcoin (convert currency1 to bitcoin and then bitcoin to currency2). This can reduce an 8% (or higher loss) to as little as 1%. This might not be the kind of spending you envisage, but it's nonetheless beneficial to the user.
You're probably best to avoid trying to receive bitcoins in return for things like sysadmin work. If you end goal is to get bitcoins, you will likely get more of them by earning cash then just converting some or all of it to bitcoins.
What I'm saying is that rather than going to lots of effort to use Bitcoin for something that's difficult to achieve, you're better off using Bitcoin for what it's great for.
Another resource for finding merchants/things for spending your bitcoins is spendabit.co. There are several-million things listed there.
In terms of getting paid in Bitcoin, Coinality is likely the current market leader. It looks like they had several new listings just today (4 August 2014).
(Disclaimer: I am involved with spendabit.co.)
People are definitely spending bitcoins--BitPay Inc processed over 5.2 Million dollars worth of eCommerce in March 2013, and that was before the full media glut of April. Some excerpts from their blog:
This eCommerce activity from merchants selling computers, consumer electronics, precious metals, and even government services has likely eclipsed the illicit activity widely estimated from sites like Silk Road.
BitPay has also approved over 1,300 new merchant applications during the month of March, bringing their total number of approved merchants to over 4,500. The explosive growth in BitPay’s business comes after February’s payment processing volume of $687,000 in transactions with 2,300 completed invoices.
BitPay is even hiring right now, though for software engineers rather than sysadmins.
Similarly, Coinbase reported recently that they are processing 15 Million dollars per month. Their business is a combination of eCommerce and Exchange activity, though.
Talking more specifically about your desire to be paid in bitcoins, Finnish Company SC5 and the Internet Archive are both well known companies who have decided to give their employees the option to receive partial compensation in bitcoins; while Expensify supports Bitcoin as an option for employee reimbursement, focussing especially on the international use case.
Note the "partial" part of the above, however. Bitcoin is very good at certain things, but it's probably not very good at being your whole salary, at least not at present. Bitcoin thrives in being global, irreversible, and fast--not stable. I'm a huge Bitcoin fan, and I'd advise taking your salary at least partly in something else. It would suck to have a market fluctuation wipe out your ability to pay bills! It's better to hold and use amounts of Bitcoin you can afford to lose, seeing as how the technology is still early and experimental.
