We Accept Bitcoin.
Here's Why That's a Statement.

Why We Accept Bitcoin

This isn't a marketing stunt. We didn't add a "Pay with Crypto" button because it's trendy, or because some product manager thought it would look good on a landing page. We accept Bitcoin because we believe in what it represents — and because a company built on privacy and self-sovereignty should accept the most private and self-sovereign form of money ever created.

FaceVault exists to verify identity without compromising privacy. We encrypt your face before it hits disk. We delete your data when the retention window closes. We run every neural network on our own hardware. We operate a Tor hidden service. Every architectural decision we make is rooted in a single principle: your data is yours.

It would be hypocritical to build all of that and then force every customer through a Stripe checkout — a system that requires a bank account, a credit card issuer, a payment processor, and a network of intermediaries who can freeze, reverse, or surveil any transaction at will. Bitcoin fixes this.

Proof of Work: The Elegant Brutality

Proof of Work is the beating heart of Bitcoin. It's the mechanism that makes the whole thing work — not through trust, not through reputation, not through legal contracts, but through physics and mathematics. It is, in the most literal sense, the conversion of energy into truth.

Here's how it works. Miners compete to find a number — a nonce — that, when hashed together with the block's transactions using SHA-256, produces a result below a target threshold. This target is astronomically small. Finding a valid nonce requires trillions of attempts. There is no shortcut. You cannot reason your way to the answer. You cannot fake it. You must do the work.

When a miner finds a valid nonce, the proof is trivial for anyone to verify — one hash computation. But producing it required an enormous expenditure of energy and hardware. This asymmetry is the genius of Proof of Work: hard to produce, easy to verify, impossible to fake.

Every block in the Bitcoin blockchain is anchored to the physical world through the energy that was spent to mine it. You cannot rewrite history without re-doing all of that work. And as each new block is added, the cost of rewriting any previous block grows exponentially. After six confirmations, reversing a Bitcoin transaction would require more energy than many countries consume in a year. This isn't security by policy. It's security by thermodynamics.

Why PoW Beats PoS (And It's Not Close)

The crypto industry spent the last few years telling itself that Proof of Stake is the future. Ethereum's merge in 2022 was treated as a watershed moment. And Proof of Stake is clever. It works for many use cases. But it is not — and can never be — what Proof of Work is.

Proof of Stake secures a network by having validators lock up capital. The more you stake, the more influence you have. On its face, this sounds efficient. But think about what it actually means: the people with the most money get the most power. That's not a revolution. That's just recreating the financial system we already have, with extra steps.

Proof of Work has a property that Proof of Stake fundamentally lacks: unforgeable costliness. Every block has an objective, verifiable, real-world cost that cannot be faked, borrowed, or printed into existence. Nick Szabo called this "unforgeable costliness" — the same property that makes gold valuable. You can't wish gold into existence. You have to dig it out of the ground. Bitcoin works the same way, except the "ground" is the SHA-256 hash space and the "digging" is measured in joules.

There's also the "nothing at stake" problem. In PoS, validators can vote on multiple chain forks simultaneously because voting costs them nothing. Various slashing mechanisms attempt to address this, but they add complexity and introduce their own attack surfaces. In PoW, there is no such ambiguity. Mining on a fork costs real energy. Miners are economically forced to converge on a single chain. Consensus emerges from physics, not from punishment rules.

The Energy "Problem" That Isn't

"But Bitcoin uses too much energy!" This is the criticism that never dies, and it reveals more about the critic than the criticised. Yes, Bitcoin uses energy. A lot of it. That's the point. The energy expenditure is the security. Complaining that Bitcoin uses too much energy is like complaining that the vault door at a bank is too heavy. The weight is the feature.

But let's engage with the argument honestly, because it deserves better than dismissal.

Energy use is not inherently bad. We don't criticise hospitals for using electricity. We don't criticise the internet for consuming 10% of global power. The question is whether the energy is well spent. Bitcoin provides a globally accessible, censorship-resistant, politically neutral monetary network that has operated without downtime for 17 years. If that's not worth powering, what is?

21 Million: The Hardest Money Ever Created

There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. Not approximately. Not unless a committee decides otherwise. Exactly 21 million, enforced by code that every node on the network independently verifies. This is the supply schedule, and it has never deviated by a single satoshi since the genesis block on 3 January 2009.

Every four years, the block reward — the number of new bitcoin created per block — is cut in half. This event, called the halving, is the most predictable monetary policy in history. The most recent halving occurred in April 2024, reducing the reward from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC per block. By 2140, the last satoshi will be mined, and no new bitcoin will ever be created.

Scarcity matters. Human civilisation has always converged on the scarcest, most durable, most verifiable medium of exchange available. For thousands of years, that was gold. Bitcoin is scarcer than gold (we keep finding more gold; we will never find more bitcoin), more portable (it moves at the speed of light), more divisible (each bitcoin splits into 100 million satoshis), and more verifiable (anyone can audit the total supply in seconds). It is the hardest money ever invented, and it's secured by the most powerful computer network humanity has ever built.

Identity Infrastructure Deserves Sound Money

FaceVault is identity infrastructure. Businesses use us to verify that a person is who they claim to be. That verification produces some of the most sensitive data imaginable — faces, documents, biometric embeddings. We take the responsibility of handling that data seriously enough to encrypt it with AES-256-GCM, manage keys through HashiCorp Vault, and purge it on schedule.

We think the money that pays for that service should be held to the same standard. Sound money. Verifiable. Incorruptible. Not subject to the whims of a central bank, a sanctions list, or a compliance department at a payment processor who has never heard of you.

There's a philosophical alignment between Bitcoin and what we do. Both are systems that replace trust in institutions with trust in mathematics. Bitcoin replaces the trust you place in a central bank with SHA-256 and ECDSA. FaceVault replaces the trust you place in a human reviewer with ArcFace embeddings and cosine distance. Both say the same thing: don't trust, verify.

How We Built It: No Middlemen

We didn't integrate Coinbase Commerce or BitPay. We didn't route payments through a third-party crypto processor. We built our own payment pipeline, because the entire point of accepting Bitcoin is to remove intermediaries, not replace them with crypto-flavoured ones.

The entire flow — from clicking "Pay Crypto" to seeing your plan activate — happens without any centralised payment processor touching your funds. Your bitcoin goes directly from your wallet to ours. Exactly as Satoshi intended.

USDT TRC-20: The Stablecoin Option

Not everyone wants to spend their bitcoin — and we respect that. If you're holding BTC as a long-term store of value (and you should be), spending it on a monthly subscription might feel wrong. That's why we also accept USDT on the TRON network.

USDT TRC-20 gives you dollar-denominated stability with crypto-native rails. Fees are negligible (fractions of a cent), confirmations are fast (seconds), and you don't need a bank account to hold or send it.

Our USDT integration is fully self-hosted. We monitor our deposit address via TronGrid's API, matching incoming transfers by unique amounts (we add random cents to each payment to differentiate concurrent transactions). No custodial service, no third-party wallet. Self-sovereign payments for a self-sovereign identity platform.

The Future Is Permissionless

We built FaceVault to verify identity without asking anyone's permission. We process faces on our own hardware, encrypt data with our own keys, and serve our site over Tor. Now we accept payment without asking anyone's permission, too.

Bitcoin is the only payment network in human history that cannot be shut down, censored, or inflated away. It has survived government bans, exchange collapses, media hit pieces, and 17 years of people calling it dead. It's still here. Still producing a block every 10 minutes. Still doing the work.

If you believe in privacy, self-sovereignty, and building systems that don't require permission to operate — you should be paying with Bitcoin. And now, on FaceVault, you can.