Typical Friday story: Finnish dev shop now paying employees in Bitcoins

Why does this stuff always come up right before the weekend?

Finnish firm SC5, specializing in HTML5 development for cross-platform app delivery, is starting to give its employees a new salary option: Bitcoins.

Because, well, why the heck not? Plus, the shop also employs Bitcoin’s co-founder.

“We are doing this just out of curiosity to try out new things,” writes Martti Malmi, the self-proclaimed “youngest guy” at SC5’s offices and one of the Bitcoin founders. When Malmi joined the team earlier this year, he had the idea that he was just gonna be working on server-side stuff, front-end stuff, responsive design stuff. But it looks like promoting and implementing Bitcoin stuff has crept into his job description, as well.

For now, SC5 will only offer partial salary-to-Bitcoin replacement and will use the daily exchange rate on each payday to determine how many Bitcoins are doled out.

The peer-to-peer currency, Malmi said, “fits our vision of the world quite well. It allows for open source development, competition and innovation in the field of payments and Internet commerce. Based on cryptography, it is secure and deterministic as we require for digital services.”

In fact, he continues, it’s more secure than credit cards.

What do y’all think? Would you ever pay someone — or want to be paid — in Bitcoins?