This week, I offered my employees the option to receive a portion of their salary in bitcoin. Crickets.

I can confirm the cliche that we are indeed very early in this space.

Having come to understand crypto in the last couple of years, I figured it was possible there might be some other closet crypto bugs out there who just hadn’t made their presence known yet. So in our weekly staff meeting (11 people, located in a major eastern US city) I asked if there was any interest in exploring the possibility of receiving some portion of pay in bitcoin on an opt-in basis. I threw out the possibility of 1-10% of salary payable in bitcoin.

Needless to say, there were no takers. And one person’s face can only be described as a mixture of shock, confusion, and horror.

My full plan probably would have included paying a premium—that is I’d be willing to pay an amount in bitcoin that is, say, 2% higher than the fiat equivalent salary. But I didn’t mention that part, as I am very sensitive to looking like I’m trying to entice anyone into anything. I just wanted to see if there would be any genuine interest. There was not.

The benefit of the proposed offer is that, like any salary, the bitcoin-denominated amount would be settled and would not fluctuate. This is to your advantage if you think that bitcoin is a structurally appreciating asset, which historically it has been. So, for example, let’s say you agree to be paid .0025 BTC per week along with the remainder in fiat. If you think the market is going up, then over time your weekly .0025 BTC becomes more and more valuable. I think many of us can easily imagine it being worth considerably more into the future. Yes, there would be pull-backs, but historically the overall direction of bitcoin is up relative to fiat over time. The salary would be adjusted yearly for deflation, just as fiat salaries are adjusted yearly for inflation.

In terms of getting in and out of the system, I’d probably do something similar to the way health insurance works in some countries, including the US. There would be an open period where anybody could opt in. Then you could opt out at any time, but you couldn’t opt back in until the open period the following year.

Anyway, we didn’t get that far because when I asked, all I heard were crickets. So it won’t go any further.