You wrote "Funds are sent directly to the merchant's BitShares account (required)" ;
My only concern is if merchants will be receptive to this idea since they will need to receive payments to their bitshares accounts, and that seems to be a problem in terms tax requirements. Over here where I am from every purchase I make there is VAT included and that tax has nothing to do with the merchant but tax authorities require merchants to hand over those taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. Hence , the merchant in this case acts as an intermediary tax collector. Now, as merchants probably purchase inputs using fiat money receiving cryptocurrency as a payment might complicate their accounting procedure in terms of taxes. I would like to hear how this will be solved. It seems to me that for the time being there is a need for an intermediary entity acting as the payer- like a teller serving the bitshares ecosystem. Ken ?
Yes, we are requiring all merchants to have a BitShares account. Merchants have this same requirement if they want to process credit cards. Credit card merchant accounts are much worse though with their fees, gateway accounts, ssl certs and all kinds of other requirements. Smartcoins become the obvious choice for growth.
The moment funds are collected from the customer or wallet user, they are saved in the transaction history with a fiat equivalent (looked up in real-time via the DEx and CCEDK). Upon export, the merchants accountant can just look at the fiat equivalents coming in and doesn't need to know anything about how crypto works. No banks needed. I do it the same way in my personal expenditures of crypto. I always log the fiat equivalent at that moment in a spreadsheet so my accountant knows everything she needs to know for taxes, writeoffs, etc.
