Using Upwork is an experience from another dimension. They accept credit and debit, but not prepaid, cards. They also accept PayPal, which is an Internet abortion. It would be less of a problem if those payment methods worked with smarter anti-fraud measures that make them usable but I can only imagine user experience engineers locked in a cage there. In Upwork you can select and talk to a freelancer in a few minutes but can spend days trying to fund your account. I am not obviously talking about paying them a very few hundred dollars. If the amount is small you can pass through the eye of the PayPal needle but not if the price is higher. In the meanwhile you are anxious to use one of the native permissionless Internet currencies.

The short story is that you can sell your bitcoins in LocalBitcoins.com and receive US dollars in Upwork via a third party PayPal account. The trick is to instruct the buyer to send the payment to employer-paypal@upwork.com, then chat with an Upwork support agent (login, click “Help & Support” and then “Chat with an agent”), and send the transaction information to him. The Upwork support service is incredible good and helpful. The trivial way to use other cryptocurrencies is via ShapeShift.

That is it!

Note: Even if you are a responsible Internet citizen you should know that using PayPal and bitcoins poses extra risks due to transaction reversals.