The latest reports suggest that the mayor of Cool Valley, Missouri was exploring ideas of giving up to $1,000 in bitcoin to some of the residents. The mayor wants to set aside over $1.4 million in bitcoin which will be distributed among the city’s 1,500 residents.
In an August 19 interview with St. Louis news outlet KSDK, Mayor Jayson Stewart stated that he wished to see “every single household in my city receive some level of Bitcoin.” Stewart also said that the funds might probably come from some very supportive donors. However, he did not rule out using money from the government’s pandemic relief response to launch this venture.
The mayor never specified how much bitcoin (BTC) the city could distribute to every resident, but said that it could be any amount up to $1,000 which would translate to about $1.5 million. That amount is equal to around 30 BTC at the time of writing. Nonetheless, he also said that the funds counld need Cool Valley residents to HODL for up to five years.
Stewart added:
“My number one concern is that someone just sells their Bitcoin to pay their car note, and then when Bitcoin is sitting at like $500,000 all these years later, they’re going to really regret that. I feel that fundamentally, this is the best way to meet [everyone’s] basic needs — to get Bitcoin into the hands of people who can use it the most.”
The mayor’s bitcoin initiative is almost the same as that proposed by Andrew Yang, a 2020 U.S. presidential election candidate. Yang proposed giving every American $1,000 a month in universal basic income (UBI). Although he failed to clinch the Democratic Party nomination, UBI was put in the media spotlight and received a seemingly strong support.
Legislators in other United States cities have also adopted pro-crypto policy stands. The mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, has proposed since 2017 to allow residents to pay taxes using bitcoin and insisted that he wanted his city to have the “most progressive crypto laws.”
As the latest market data shows, the price of bitcoin is trying to tackle the $49,000 resistance level at the time of writing.
