Satoshi's Sidewalk #9: Welcome to Miami
The City of Miami is hosting the Bitcoin White Paper on their website. Is this Bitcoin Urbanism?
On Wednesday Miami’s Mayor Francis Suarez announced the city is hosting the Bitcoin White Paper on their official website. Miami and Suarez were the first officials to announce doing so. A host of other government officials in the US and around the world followed suit. The act is in response to Craig Wright’s threat of lawsuits against bitcoin.org and bitcoincore.org to take down the white paper. For those unaware Wright claims to be Satoshi, which is verifiably false. In response to the threats, #BitcoinTwitter denizens have posted the white paper wherever they could (see Streisand effect).
Miami posting the white paper is an excellent start - the first snowflake falling long before the avalanche, if you will - for the adoption of a bitcoin standard on a municipal level. It’s not quite turning the city’s cash into bitcoin or revamping all things Miami government - yet it is an important touchpoint. Vijay Boyapati has emphasized the importance of touchoints for bitcoin adoption. It’s a process of hearing about bitcoin, talking bout it with others, and coming into contact with it repeatedly prior to purchasing a few sats or going head first down the rabbit hole.
From our humble Bitcoin Urbanism perspective, municipal governments have to start somewhere. I don’t expect the Miami local government to adopt a bitcoin standard overnight. Suarez is certainly more open to bitcoin than, say Scottsdale’s mayor, and is solely responsible for starting the migration of Silicon Valley to Silicon Beach.
A hard money monetary system is the most powerful weapon for rolling back government’s ability for intervention and enforcement when talking about private property rights. Local governments simply won’t have the funds to enforce their policies. Cities must now compete for capital and individuals who are no longer required to be and work in the same city. The Sovereign Individual thesis is playing out in real time.
Municipalities will come to the realization of the inevitable bitcoin standard and will be forced to adapt. Doing so will put greater strain on their finances and force long overdue retrospection on local policies: from zoning, to building codes, to streets, to infrastructure maintenance, to social policies (like awful public art). The debt-financing-as-lifeblood is come to an abrupt end. Many cities will be bankrupt and forced to start over. Wealth creation will be back in the front seat. To create wealth, one must be productive.
To this we say:
Make Real Estate Financially Productive Again.