As national economies and currencies are folding like tents worldwide, from Argentina, to Greece, to Puerto Rico, financial experts are advising to invest in Gold and Silver to protect your savings. Now Bitwage is looking to take Bitcoin and Gold to the cloud by offering a new service called “Cloud Savings.”

Bitwage enters the Gold & Silver market

Bitwage provides a way for employees, freelancers, and contract workers to get paid their salaries in bitcoin instead of fiat currency. It is a convenient option for the person who wants to use bitcoin as a part of their investment strategy, save for retirement, or speculate on the market. Any percentage of a person’s salaried income can be quickly converted into bitcoin through Bitwage.

Now Bitwage has partnered with Bitreserve to create what they call “Cloud Savings.”  This gives customers the option to choose any portion of their salary to be split and held in 9 currencies and 4 precious metal, including US dollars, bitcoins, Euros, Pounds, Mexican Pesos, Indian Rupees, Gold, and Silver.

While in the long-term it is preferable to obtain physical possession of precious metals, if you invest in precious metal commodities. The two companies have created an ETF that provides great financial flexibility to the user. BitWage COO Jonathan Chester explained to Cointelegraph:

“So when you are paid (thru Bitwage) in Gold, it is better to think of it as getting paid in a Gold ETF.  The main difference is that this Gold ETF is so liquid that you can buy goods and services directly from funds held in the ETF. Or you can even load our debit card with the value held in this Gold ETF (although this process is a little manual at the moment).  In the end, it's cloud savings held in the value of whatever you like.”

Saving for a rainy day in diversified, non-dollar-based instruments is always a wise move, financially. While many will get wet in the future, some will look at cloud cover in a whole new light.

BitWage CEO Jonathan Chester

Bitwage Partners with Xapo

The company has also expanded their portfolio via relationships with Xapo to provide debit card service for Bitcoin users and BitReserve to allow the acquisition of precious metals like Gold and Silver.

Bitwage has learned a lot about the Bitcoin market over the last year. Based in California, Chester found that a small number of people made up a large amount of Bitwage’s transaction volume.

Many U.S. customers used the Bitwage system to segue out of the deteriorating financial system. Employees overseas, on the other hand, just wanted a better way to receive their wages into a more stable and attractive digital currency over the fiat currency option in their country. This has led to a more international scope of business, and all the compliance headaches that go along with national regulations and taxes.

Chester says the Bitwage debit card has been a very popular option except for one issue. They are offering it in virtually every country on Earth (170 in total), but not in the United States.

The problem is that Visa will not associate with bitcoin in America despite studying Bitcoin blockchain technology through Visa Europe. It is also well known that Mastercard is more of an adversary than a progressive thinking future partner of Bitcoin at this point. Thus, it seems that Bitwage can’t help everybody when it comes to Bitcoin debit cards, but Chester is still hopeful of a solution in the future for this impasse.

For those outside of the U.S. this how the card works if you want to cash out your bitcoins into a local currency or shop with the card directly:

“You sign up for the ‘Cloud Spend’ option on Bitwage, which creates an account with our debit card partner, Xapo. Then you can manage all of your transactions from the bitwage dashboard and fill up the card either through payroll or by sending to the address provided through our interface. Once the bitcoins are in the wallet and there have been 6 confirmations (which takes about an hour), you can spend using the card anywhere that accepts Visa.  The bitcoins are debited from your account at the point of sale.  If there are not enough funds in the account, the transaction will be rejected in real time.”

Do you want to invest in spendable ETFs or physical gold? Does Cloud Savings help your economic diversification plan? Share and comment below.