Living Room of Satoshi — free and simple payment of Australian bills with Bitcoin !
Australian focused bitcoin payment service
Next up in our series covering the most interesting Bitcoin exchanges and services out there is Living Room of Satoshi — a unique service that makes paying any BPAY bill with Bitcoin easy for Australian users. Founded in May 2014, the company’s been generating a buzz in the last half of the year, winning “Best Pitch” at the Technology & Innovation — The Future Of Digital Payments Conference. LRoS enables Australians and businesses pay a range of BPAY bills including utility bills, credit cards and tuition fees among others. The service processes AUD$20–25,000 worth оf bill payments реr week and provides nice visual statistics on their website.
BPAY, perfect for Australian expats using Bitcoins
One of the most appealing features of Brisbane based LRoS is how easy they make paying any BPAY bill with Bitcoin. Living Room of Satoshi enables Australian people and businesses (globally) pay a variety of bills of any size — anything from road tolls to broadband / mobile charges to tuition fees. Users can simply enter the biller and reference, and have a bitcoin address generated, with payment cleared with the biller in 1–2 days. For more information, see the LRoS FAQ.
Free Service
By giving users the advantages that the Bitcoin payments system brings and providing a free service, LRoS seek to contribute to the growth of Bitcoin as a digital payments system and brings a reliable Bitcoin payments service to the Australian market.
Earlier on we spoke to Daniel from Living Room of Satoshi to tell us more about them.
Hello, Daniel. Introduce yourself. What service do you provide? What markets do you operate in?
Hi! I’m Daniel Alexiuc — a developer/entrepreneur from Brisbane, Australia. I co-founded Living Room of Satoshi in March 2014, which is a free service that allows you to pay your everyday Australian bills (electricity, registration, phone, credit card etc) with Bitcoin
What would you say is your advantage over competitors / other “traditional methods”? What is your approach to security?
LRoS is amazingly simple to use. We aim to make bitcoin accessible to everyone, and paying bills is something everybody does. There are no fees, and you can use bitcoin to pay over 19,000 Australian billers; virtually all of the Australian market. Bill payments are anonymous. Feel free to pay my electricity bill if you want! And in the spirit of the blockchain, we make all of the non-sensitive payment information available on our website, so you can get an idea of what kind of bills people are paying with bitcoin. (https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com/graphs)
What would you say are the prospects for your market? What challenges do you foresee?
The main challenges at the moment in Australia for us are consumer adoption and tax regulation. We are working hard to improve consumer adoption, by making it easier for people to use bitcoin in their everyday lives. However, the current tax legislation on bitcoin in Australia makes it very challenging for businesses to take full advantage of bitcoin as a payment system. We are hopeful that the ongoing Senate enquiries result in regulation that make things easier for Australian businesses.
What is the plan for LRoS for the future?
Our goal is to make bitcoin a viable alternative bill payment option for large billers, and to get bitcoin on to the bottom of your household bills as a payment option. We think that bitcoin can give more control over payments back to businesses and their customers, and take it away from the current inefficient and expensive payment systems.
What is your outlook on the future of Bitcoin itself? What opportunities and challenges do you foresee?
Digital currencies are not going away. As a former ecommerce store owner (livefish.com.au), and developer on multiple banking and payment systems, I know firsthand that bitcoin has a huge potential for business owners to make payments faster, cheaper and simpler. The challenge for services like ours is to make using bitcoin easy enough for all kinds of people to be comfortable with.
We thank Daniel Alexiuc of Living Room of Satoshi for taking the time to speak to us.
We want to note that this post IS NOT a paid endorsement, but a fair reflection of the service from a 3rd person’s perspective.
To finalize it can be seen that Living Room of Satoshi makes all the benefits that Bitcoin brings accessible to Aussie users and enables growth of Bitcoin as a payment platform in the Australian market. The future of Living Room of Satoshi is a positive one, despite challenges posed by the current taxation climate. As the Australian regulators develop an understanding of the potential of Bitcoin as an alternative payments system they should enable and support the system that is presenting itself as a genuine disruptor in electronic payments.
Australian regulators should follow the example of services such as LRoS who make life easier for users and support innovation by helping the Australian Bitcoin market grow. Based on feedback and simplicity of service, BTCXE give LRoS 9/10 marks for their service. It would be nice to make security / data implications clearer on their site to address some users’ concerns, however the practical benefit and the easy, efficient experience makes this a truly sweet service.
I hope that 2015 will see similar services appear in other markets as well, and hopefully this will be the year that regulators take Bitcoin seriously and enable a framework that would grow and embrace, rather than strangle this upcoming trend in payments.
For more information, visit Living Room of Satoshi
Also, follow them on Twitter: @Roomofsatoshi
and Facebook: LivingRoomofSatoshi
for more information, contact them by e-mail: support@livingroomofsatoshi.com
