Ohio is now the first in the country to allow payments in the digital currency bitcoin from businesses paying 23 kinds of taxes, from commercial activity taxes to gas and cigarette taxes to sales taxes to employee withholding taxes.
The state wouldn’t actually take in and hold bitcoin; businesses would pay through the third-party processor Bitpay. State treasurer Josh Mandel says Bitpay, headquartered in Atlanta, is one of few companies that will quickly convert bitcoin into dollars.
“But hopefully, there will eventually be a company in Ohio or maybe multiple companies in Ohio that do payment processing for cryptocurrency.”
And Mandel says the fee will be 1%, which is a huge sum for large payments, but it’s less than the 2.5% charged for businesses paying via credit card. Mandel says the goal is to establish Ohio as a leader in blockchain technology, and to eventually accept other cryptocurrencies from businesses and individual taxpayers. It’s uncertain how many businesses might sign up.