As long as a business has expenses in Euro (like we do), there is an incentive to set prices in Euro.
I was thinking about how to price things, for the next nostr:npub1purpleye8gzrzss99nzqqnemtf7g8xxj8p950nkyknnuqzycuh5qnazkzp retreat.
There's no real incentive to price in euros, anymore, as the money they pay might end up not covering costs, because of the amount of months you have to reserve, in advance. But, if you price in satoshi, the people who pay a bit later could end up paying much more (because of the conversion from euros, that they'd usually have to do) than the people who got tipped-off about the meetup, first. Which is sort of unfair, and could even end up being some ridiculous amount. On the other hand, it gives people an incentive to reserve a spot, earlier. Should probably have people pay, in tranches, to smooth things out.
Generally, having people pay for larger purchases or subscriptions in tranches, with the tranche-calculation closer to real-time, seems to be a sensible way of dealing with the volatility.
Decisions, decisions...
Discussion
Well, as long as euro prices are highly stable and Bitcoin stagnates. If they start euro stimmies again, all bets are off.
We like pricing in sats because we're offering a service to people who want to get a Bitcoin economy going. As much fun as it is to zap each other, it's more exciting to move larger sums. Feels more significant and it's a harder test.
The fee-advantage of lightning tends to thin out, once you get over 100 euros, or so. I had to use Phoenix to accept payment, at one point, cuz channelz ain't channeling, and the fees were higher than on-chain. 😬 On the other hand, on-chain can be sorta slow. Didn't show up, confirmed, until hours later.
Another thing that comes up, in a real-life situation, is that one person can collect cash euros (rounded up, to cover fees) from multiple people and then send the sum of the payments on-chain or over Lightning. I thought that was a clever work-around, for bad internet connections or whatever. Combine the two cash monies.
Makes sense regarding stagnation, but I would say that it is preferable to use Bitcoin as a reserve currently rather than main currency used for accounting purposes.
At the moment, for "normal euro/dollar" businesses, yes, I'd use fiat for pricing. It's making less and less sense to bother with fiat, in more and more countries, tho.
What might make sense, is to start normalizing the sight of Satoshi, by listing the Satoshi-equivalent on your bills and price tags, so that people start to get a feel for what things cost. Sort of the way they listed EUR/DM, prior to introducing the Euro 💶 . Would also allow people to compare prices, better, across the various currency regions.
I like this idea, unsure how it is the best to implement UX-wise
GNU Cash lets you do stuff like that, I think. At least, on the boot-keeping end, as you have your Bitcoin account and its fiat-worth is calculated IRL.
I don't know how it would work with billing. A lot of people in the Euro area probably still have this dual-system setup, lingering in the billing software. Would just need to set it to a different currency and calculate the price from a larger trading desk.
A benefit of pricing your own stuff in-house, in satoshis, is that you then can display the fiat-price equivalent for each country you supply to, by calculating their fiat-price for that day. Then your in-house satoshi price is set by your own costs, and they deal with the fiat fluctuations on their end. Or pay you in satoshi.
We actually already had this issue, as we were dealing with Swiss guests, and they had to go get Euros extra, just to pay us and were like ugh. Next time, we could set the price in Satoshi and they could pay in Satoshi or Swiss Francs equivalent, and skip the Euros.
It is a good idea but hosting expenses end up in fiat for following reasons: datacenters (I mean real ones who are corpo) and electricity bills are always in fiat. Given Bitcoin to fiat exchange rate is fluctuated, and unfortunately in the short-term might be actually decreasing, it is really hard to define prices in satoshis.
Yeah, energy is harder than something like hospitality.