Can you buy a sandwich? That reads like a rhetorical question, but it’s not.
As with buying property, buying a BLT with bitcoin is, in theory, possible. But in practice, your options are extremely limited. And if you’re starving, forgedaboutit.
Back in 2019, the first widely reported crypto-for-food sale took place. Incredibly, the pantry item of choice was a packet of Arnott’s Tim Tams. It was the first purchase made on Moonmarket.com, a Bitcoin-only buying and selling platform. The buyer was based in US and paid 0.00048446 BTC.
Every couple of months, a new crypto story hits the headlines indicating that world dominance is nigh. Back in September, El Salvador adopted bitcoin as a national currency (here’s an update on how that’s panning out.) At the end of 2021, online marketplace, Car For Coin, launched and made it possible to purchase luxury cars—including Teslas, which famously refused crypto payment just months earlier.
In Australia, adoption of crypto as a form of payment has been slow, and almost non-existent in the property market. Almost. In 2018, vendors put their four-bedroom home in Surry Hills on the market for $5M, willing to accept full payment in Bitcoin.
In 2020, a renovated four-bedroom, four-car garage home in Reservoir, Victoria, was on offer for part or full payment in Bitcoin. At the time, the agent explained that executing the sale would be complex, saying, “We’d have to work out the exchange rate for it at the time, there would be a monetary value based on the exchange rate, and put some other legal paperwork in place to define that.” In other words, we have no idea how it’d work.
Precedents are scarce, but it can be said that property transactions involving digital currencies work best if both buyers and sellers hold cryptocurrency accounts. In May of 2021, former Olympic swimmer Cameron McEvoy was accepting bitcoin in the sale of his Isle of Capri villa, wanting to build on his existing cryptocurrency shares.
In the US, the crypto real estate market is moving at a much faster pace. Last month, a home is Gulfport, Florida, was sold as an NFT. The real estate agent overseeing the sale said she sees a future where traditional mortgages and closings will be a thing of the past.
But if you thought Australia’s property market was hard to predict, Bitcoin takes value volatility to a whole new level. Accepting bitcoin comes with high financial risk, especially if you plan only to then trade your bitcoin for Australian dollars. Depending on the day you cash in, you could lose literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. The allure, of course, is that you could also make the same amount.
Buying property with the money you make from cryptocurrency is another topic
all together—of which 40-year-old Bitcoin entrepreneur and founder of derivatives trading platform Synthetix, Kain Warwick, is an expert. Last year, Warwick bought a $12.2M Bronte home for his parents, proving not only that investing in Bitcoin can pay off, but also that sometimes the bank of mum and dad accepts deposits, too.
