The mayor of Miami Francis Suarez is fascinated by bitcoin and says he’s working hard to bring the world’s number one digital currency to the city in droves.
Suarez Sees Miami as a BTC Hub
Right now, he’s looking to do this by attracting new financial and tech startups to the region. He wants to combine the best elements of New York City and Silicon Valley and establish South Florida as the USA’s next big tech hub. In addition, he’s got a few other ideas that he’s playing with right now that could potentially see bitcoin garner a much larger presence within the city’s borders.
Among those ideas are allowing local fees and taxes to be paid in BTC and crypto. Furthermore, he says the city’s treasury is potentially looking into investing in bitcoin and placing large amounts of capital into the asset, while the third idea is potentially giving employees their salaries in bitcoin and ensuring all workers are paid in crypto.
Suarez claims that bitcoin is the future of finance, and he thinks it’s going to be huge in the next few years. While there are many of us that believe this alongside him and want to see bitcoin reach the top of the financial ladder, there are a couple of issues with some of his plans.
The main problem comes with issuing employee paychecks in bitcoin. There are several barricades that could potentially get in the way completely or stop this from happening quickly. The first is that bitcoin remains quite volatile at press time. Sometimes that volatility is good as it’s been lately, though sometimes, things can get ugly, and bitcoin can lose quite a bit of value in little or no time at all.
If we’re paying people in bitcoin, that means all the money they need to survive is up in the air. The money they need to live and provide for their families is trapped in a heavily volatile cloud that could go up in smoke at a moment’s notice. If this happens, that money could significantly decrease or disappear overnight, meaning the employees won’t have the funds they need to satisfy their daily expenses.
Can This Really Be Accomplished?
While they have an opportunity to quickly transfer that money into fiat, this presents another problem in that they’ll have to pay additional taxes on the funds. We already pay taxes on what we earn each year but transferring bitcoin into fiat and vice versa requires the payment of additional taxes. Thus, employees that get paid in BTC or crypto are likely to be taxed twice under certain conditions and we really need to wonder if that’s fair – especially if their salaries are already low.
In any case, while Suarez seems to have his heart in the right place, this plan may not be doable for some time.
