M from miamiAyor, Francis Suarez, is eager to reshape his city as a haven for tech entrepreneurs and the tax dollars that come in his wake. Its most recent branding effort involves an effort to make the city offer its municipal employees the option of receivingitcoin, and he would love it if citizens could pay their taxes using volatile cryptocurrency too.
On Thursday, Suarez announced in Twitter that the Miami government commission passed a resolution allowing the city to study the feasibility of providing city officials with the option of being paid in bitcoin. The meeting details were not sent to the city website yet, but Bloomberg reports that the resolution was a little less ambitious than the mayor wanted.
The committee gave its approval to the measure in a 4-1 vote, but adjusted the language to order a study from the city manager to assess the impact of the resolution’s goals. These goals also include the potential to allow the city to invest a portion of its funding in bitcoin. This may require approval at the state level.
Suarez was eager to take tech industry workers who are fleeing the high cost of living in Silicon Valley at a time when most of their work is being done remotely. More recently, he made headlines after I talked with Elon Musk on the Boring Company building underground tunnels to help alleviate Miami’s traffic problems. “If the governor and the mayor want to, we’ll do it,” Musk tweeted. But critics say such an initiative can be a foolish mission because, among other things, the soil under the city is made of highly soluble limestone that is full of caves. Even if logistical obstacles were overcome, it would be an extremely expensive project, a geologist said Limited.
Suarez’s techno-utopianism is not new, he has been a regular speaker at North America Bitcoin Conference in Miami and he is been courting The Silicon Valley royalty, like Eric Schmidt and Chris Dixon, to help lead a technological migration to their city.
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Offering employees the option of being paid in space dollars is not particularly absurd, but the notion of investing city funds in bitcoin can be a bridge too far. The price of the cryptocurrency reached a historic high close to $ 19,000 in 2017. In January 2019, it was hovering around $ 3,200. As of this morning, the cryptocurrency is going for $ 47,700. That kind of volatility made it bimpractical itcoin for use as currencyy, but it is difficult to argue against long-term gains. Still, it can be a more reliable bet than giving Elon permission to dig up the base of a sinking city.