In the single year I’ve been writing about Bitcoin in the Kelowna area, it’s price has gone from the $1k ballpark to the $20k briefly and down to around the $4k mark now, a full year later. Whoever chose to invest this time last year has had a wild ride, but still come out on top from an investment perspective.
Last year, a splash was made up in Vernon about a Bitcoin ATM being installed at a local coffee shop. Prior to this installation, an online service known as Gonetcoin and flexcoin had several locations in Kelowna where a person could buy BTC at the front counter. A few of these places are actually chains across Canada.
Check out this listing from the Flexpin portion of Gonetcoin’s website below, and the Netcoins listing to the right here:
Pandosy Food Basket: 1953 Pandosy St. Kelowna BC V1Y 1R9 Canada
Bankhead Store: 1396 Bernard Avenue Kelowna BC V1Y 6R6 Canada
Minit Market: 1835 Dilworth Drive Suite 107 Kelowna BC V1Y 9T1 Canada
The Pit Stop C-Store & Gas Bar L: 3802 Gordon Drive Kelowna BC V1W 3Y3 Canada
Canadian Tire Gas Bar: 2403 Highway 97 Kelowna BC V1X 4J2 Canada
A new company just over a year old now, has come to the valley and installed two of their own BTC ATM’s in the Kelowna area. Mike’s Produce on Gordon Drive, and Rusty’s Sports Bar and Grill on Dilworth both now offer Badgercoin Kiosks for those wishing to buy Bitcoin. This brings to 8, the number of places a person can go to purchase BTC in person here in Kelowna.
But purchasing BTC in person is not the end of the road here. Coinmaps.org includes at least 10 businesses in the area stretching from West Kelowna to Ellison District, where a person can use their purchased BTC to buy goods and services across the valley.
Here is a visual of who these business are and where they are located: Note that Bitcoiniacs no longer exists, but they did not take their pin off the map.
Thanks to this map, a person could theoretically get their dog dropped off for it’s checkup at the vet, drop off a printing job to the printer’s, go get their hair done, book a room for the night, buy a bottle of wine to celebrate, and head home the next day spending nothing but Bitcoin! Thanks to the above maps and lists, if one of those purchases was about to come up short and a person insisted everything be done via BTC, they could run to the nearest location to buy more BTC, then return to their last desired stop to finish their purchase.
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR CANADIANS: Interestingly enough, while the Canada Revenue Agency does not consider BTC to be a valid currency, they still want their share of any value you spend in the real world, so keep your receipts for next year’s income tax report. If you buy BTC and then sell it for a higher price on any of a number of exchanges online, the difference you gain in profit will be considered capital gains by the CRA as well. While it is claimed they are doing this based on what they call the barter system, the idea of taxing gains off bartered goods says that someone in the CRA system actually DOES see BTC as a form of currency and can’t stand the idea of others profiting from it without the government doing so as well. So there is acknowledgement through budding taxation rules that Bitcoin can be used to improve someone’s financial portfolio and do business. Consider this a heads up to keep your real-world receipts of your BTC transactions, because you’ll have to translate that into Canadian funds on paper for your reporting a year from now. If the receipt already shows CAD instead of BTC, your math was done for you.
If you are a business, your reporting will include keeping a CAD record of goods or services sold to customers who paid in BTC. If you pay employees in BTC, you have to keep a record of that transaction in CAD. Just a heads up. FCS is now one of those businesses who will have to keep that record for purchases of timeblocks made by any customer who pays via BTC. So I dug up this information for my own future use, not merely to write about it here.
