Deloitte lets Luxembourg staff buy lunch in crypto

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Professional services giant Deloitte has become the latest major global firm to experiment with cryptocurrency, following the launch of a scheme which allows staff to buy lunch in cryptocurrency.

The firm, one of the ‘big four’ accountancy practices, said the scheme was designed to test the usefulness of cryptocurrency payments in a real-world environment, according to reports in the Luxembourg Times.

Laurent Collent, a partner at Deloitte’s advisory arm, was quoted in the Times saying they “think it’s good to have our employees assess this new technology,” which the firm hopes will inform its understanding of and approach to cryptocurrency usage by clients.

The partner confirmed that Deloitte was taking a broad view with its crypto experiments, and was ultimately interested in distributed ledger technology for fund management, because of the transparent audit trail recorded on the blockchain.

The initial test is being powered by the BTC token, which could mean significant lunch queues—BTC payments are generally considered to be far too slow, not to mention too expensive, to be used for microtransactions on this scale.

While the original whitepaper version of Bitcoin describes a cryptocurrency that can be used for everyday transactions such as buying lunch or paying for coffee, BTC is no longer suited to these applications.

BTC transactions are finalized after being confirmed six times, i.e. written six blocks deep on the blockchain. This can take as much as 49 minutes in practice, which would be too long in most micropayment settings.

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen whether Deloitte staff can work with BTC and its limitations, or whether switching to a more appropriate cryptocurrency like Bitcoin SV would be more effective.