Some surprising and pleasant news coming out of the state of Ohio is that the state government will now be accepting Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash via its payment portal. A CCN report read; “Ohio will become the first state in the US to officially accept tax payments in Bitcoin, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Beginning this week, businesses who plan to make settlements for their taxes with Bitcoin can visit OhioCrypto.com and register to pay all their corporate taxes to the government in BTC. The state government has partnered with crypto payment processor Bit Pay to handle the payment in crypto and conversion to dollars for the tax office.”
A brief history on Bitcoin will have you know that Bitcoin was never truly a currency, though it had some properties of a currency, such as the ability to hold value and be exchanged for other valuable commodities. Bitcoin’s status as a non-currency obviously meant that the same could not be used in the payment of taxes. The same way that you couldn’t use a voucher, a gift card, and even a bar of Gold to pay taxes, is the same way you couldn’t use Bitcoin to do the same.
Ohio has changed all this with the latest move, begging the question? Is Bitcoin now considered a real currency? If Bitcoin starts being used for other uses such as paying utilities then one could easily argue that it had become a competing currency.
It is definitely true that the infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin is yet to fully develop, and its status as a currency is not exactly true since currencies are required to be issued by a central authority. With both these facts in mind, it is safe to say that Bitcoin does remain a crypto-currency.
The move by the Ohio state government certainly flexes the superiority of crypto-currencies with regard to payments especially since fees are much more reduced when paying in crypto. All eyes will now be on Ohio and other such states in the EU making such bold crypto-currency developments.
