By David Tuckwell on Tuesday 9 May 2017
Living Room of Satoshi is helping bitcoin grow in Australia
Owing to tax law, bitcoin is small in Australia, but one company in Queensland has made it work.
A Brisbane fintech has hit a new milestone, having helped Australians pay A$5 million worth of bills with bitcoin.
The bizarrely named Living Room of Satoshi runs an online platform allowing bills - even taxes and school fees - to be paid in bitcoins instead of Aussie dollars.
All that’s required is entering the BPAY information from the bottom of a bill into the LRS website and then paying the number of bitcoins the company asks for. There are no registration requirements or fees.
“I started Living Room of Satoshi in 2014 because at the time there was very little practical use for the nascent currency Bitcoin,” said Daniel Alexiuc, the CEO of LRS.
“As the first truly international, decentralised and peer to peer currency, Bitcoin is perfectly suited to bill payments in Australia.”
The company profits from a spread between the bitcoin-AUD exchange rate. Owing to peculiarities in Australian tax law, bitcoins are taxed twice when exchanged on the Australian market for Aussie dollars (the government has pledged to fix this). So LRS exchanges its currencies on the international market instead.
The company almost went under in 2014, Mr Alexiuc told AltFi. But the past 12 months have witnessed strong revenue growth.
And what’s behind the company name?
“It is named in honour of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous and mysterious creator of the original bitcoin software,” the company says.