Miami’s mAyor, Francis Suarez, is doing his best to rename his city as a haven for tech entrepreneurs and the tax dollars who follow them. His latest branding effort includes a push to give the city the opportunity for its municipal workers to get paid in bitcoin, and he would love it if citizens could also pay their taxes using the volatile cryptocurrency.
Thursday, Suarez announced Twitter that Miami’s governing committee passed a resolution that would allow the city to study the feasibility of giving city workers the opportunity to get paiditcoin. Meeting details were not uploaded to it website of the city yet, but Bloomberg reports that the resolution was slightly less ambitious than the mayor initially wanted.
The committee approved the measure in a 4-1 vote, but adapted the language to allow a survey by the city manager to evaluate the impact of the resolution’s objectives. Those goals also include the potential for the city to invest some of its funding in bitcoin. That may require state-level approval.
Suarez has been eager to tackle tech industry workers fleeing the high cost of living of Silicon Valley at a time when most of their work is done remotely. Most recently, he made headlines after he talked to Elon Musk about the Boring Company building underground tunnels to help ease Miami’s traffic problems. “If governor and mayor want this to happen, we’ll do it,” Musk tweetedBut critics say such an initiative could be a foolish message, in part because the soil beneath the city consists of highly soluble limestone that is full of caves. Even if the logistical hurdles were overcome it would be an extremely expensive project, said a geologist Restrained
Suarez’s techno-utopianism is not new, he has been a regular speaker at the annual North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami and he is courted Silicon Valley royalty like Eric Schmidt and Chris Dixon to help lead a tech migration to his city.
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It is not terribly absurd to offer employees an option to get paid in space suits, but the idea of investing city money in bitcoin could be a bridge too far. The cryptocurrency’s price hit a record high of nearly $ 19,000 in 2017. In January 2019, it hovered around $ 3,200. As of this morning, the cryptocurrency will cost $ 47,700. That kind of volatility has bitcoin impractical for use as a currencyY, but the long-term benefits are hard to dispute. Still, it might be a more reliable guess than giving Elon permission to build one sinking city