Anyone who's worked on bitcoin related start-ups has had the experience of the tremendous load of legislation that one has to follow in order to stay within the limits of the law. This is not even a problem exclusive to bitcoin, it's an issue with any SME with an innovative idea that wants to enter the market. In my country, just from the top of my head you need to:
- Register to the chamber of commerce and pay an annual fee depending on the size of the company.
- Keep books and pay an accountant as it has to be done by a pro who signs the reports.
- Depending on your sector, you have to follow strict regulations and pay to comply: for restaurants and food related you need to have certain materials and procedures etc. For BTC you must have a KYC procedure.
- Open a bank account. Depending on the sector this might be easy or very hard, the latter is the case for BTC.
- Pay another company to receive payments! Your bank doesn't do it, so you need to look for someone to take the credit cards and payments on the internet. They take 1-2% for each payment. Same goes to pay suppliers and employees.
- If you play music in your premises, then you have to pay the local copyright association that "protects" artists. This one is the most outrageous.
- Get a system to report your sales to the local IRS. This is now mandatory for every company.
- Pay huge taxes on your sales (VAT is 19%) and then on your profits (20 to 30%)
Of course, most of the common people doesn't register anything and they do business without paying any tax, this is the only way that they're able to survive. But if you're a simple restaurant or a bar and want to play it "by the book" by the time you open doors and haven't sold the first meal, you've already paid millions of sats (let's make it the international unit of account) in BS that doesn't help you at all with your business. THEN you have to have a business model that is extremely good so you're able to pay the government's pizzo. Is this really worthy?
All this to say that I believe it's time to stop trying to appease the fiat overlords and avoid registering. I believe the business model I want is one that cannot be closed or taxed and of course runs on BTC. The ones I've seen that are doing great there: Robosats and lnp2pbot.
I wonder why SN doesn't do something alike, eventually they'll come for you if they don't like what you're doing. This is the preface to another post I'll write about a website I'm building and which needs some help, I believe I can find someone around here.
