Private Money!

[D.A. Ridgely]

Sequoia Holdings says employees can draw part of salary in cryptocurrencies

Software development services provider Sequoia Holdings LLC said on Thursday its employees can now receive a part of their salary in cryptocurrencies, should they choose to.

Under the new program, employees can elect to defer a portion of their salary into bitcoin, bitcoin cash, or the Ethereum platform’s ether, Sequoia Holdings said.

I'm professionally curious about the fiduciary standing of an employer who does this if someone's crypto of choice crashes. Rule of thumb - if everyone wants to be able to do it because there's a run up in the asset, it's going to be indefensible as sound fiduciary policy when it goes down and the lawyers show up. Corollary - it is very hard to make "the employee knew the risks" stick in pay and benefits law. Areas where this is permissible have specific sections of ERISA or whatever that say literally if you do this, this and this, the employee can eat investment risk, otherwise you are on the hook as an employer.

So an employer might be prohibited on fiduciary grounds from, say, offering employees a weekly Powerball lottery ticket in lieu of whatever part of their salary the ticket would cost? Mind you, we're not talking about retirement account funding here, where I do see a reasonable argument. But in lieu of mere salary, per se?

[JasonL]

That I'm not sure about but man I've seen the arguments surrounding fiduciary duty. It may be as you say fully exempted somehow but what I can tell you is groups of lawyers and I can give you the names of firms will spend all day every day for the rest of their lives trying to attach dollar value of losses to the deepest pockets they can find using the argument that employees can't possibly be responsible for anything ever.

[Warren]

There's a shitload of upside if you bought it at $100 and pay it out at $1,000 without having to take capital gains on it.

[D.A. Ridgely]

That I'm not sure about but man I've seen the arguments surrounding fiduciary duty. It may be as you say fully exempted somehow but what I can tell you is groups of lawyers and I can give you the names of firms will spend all day every day for the rest of their lives trying to attach dollar value of losses to the deepest pockets they can find using the argument that employees can't possibly be responsible for anything ever.

Well, sure. Lawyers gonna lawyer. I don't know what the traffic is like these days but I remember sitting in class in law school learning about shareholder derivative suits and thinking "You know, a lawyer could make a tidy living off these things." Same with nuisance suits of all sorts. I know next to nothing about employment law, but telling me that there are lawyers and entire firms looking for the deepest pockets to name as defendants on the slightest pretext is close to telling me fish swim.

[Mo]

Wait you’re telling me that a startup is completely ignorant of employment law and is fucking around and may later find out?

I’m shocked

[thoreau]

Yes, I'm sure that this guy has figured it out. Definitely.

[Warren]

I'm just trying to convince myself that I still did really good selling off most my hoard at 19k even though it's now over 50k.

[Hugh Akston]

The local slice joint accepts Dogecoin

[Shem]

This is the worst cyberpunk dystopia ever.