During Thursday’s Bitmain’s Digital Mining Conference Miami Mayor Francis Suarez concluded his speech by challenging the audience to “Go out there and elect the next President of the United States to be a pro Bitcoin president.”
A strong advocate of adopting innovation, Mayor Suarez has used Bitcoin to alter the public perception of Miami to give it the aura of something like a nascent Silicon Valley. During his speech Suarez talked about working for years to integrate Bitcoin into the Miami “way of life.”
“The city of Miami has been dubbed by many as the Bitcoin capital of the world,” he began.
Francis Suarez, son of the first Cuban born mayor of Miami, brings a non-partisan pragmatism to the Bitcoin community. Notably, Suarez made Miami the second government in the world, and the first in North America to host Satoshi’s White Paper on its government website. He has been working toward putting Bitcoin on the city’s balance sheet. Miami has seen massive job growth and innovation in the tech sector in the last year, partly as a result of his efforts.
Suarez’s goal is to make Miami the most innovative city in America. As his speech pointed out, governments can at times help facilitate such innovation, but in the case of Bitcoin and disruptive technologies which are hard or impossible to control, governments too often try to obstruct innovation.
“Governments are going to lose control of Bitcoin,” Suarez told the audience. “Control is not necessarily a bad thing for governments to lose,” he explained.
To date, Joe Biden has never spoken about Bitcoin explicitly in public. His administration is largely indifferent to, and appears to completely misunderstand what Bitcoin is. This becomes apparent when we examine how the Biden administration has failed to differentiate Bitcoin from other cryptocurrencies that are centralized, which betrays a general ignorance of any fundamental understanding of the currency.
What stances the Biden administration has taken on “crypto” and presumably Bitcoin as well seem to indicate that the administration misunderstands it to be used largely for tax evasion, which is a years-old blatant mischaracterization perpetuated by those who claim to believe Bitcoin is also used for money laundering and drug trafficking. Biden’s team has proposed to solve these illusory problems through the American Families Plan.
It is unclear who Mayor Suarez believes should replace Joe Biden as a pro Bitcoin president, although one could imagine Suarez himself or Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) as likely candidates. No such plans were laid out at the Bitmain conference, but one can hope the topic will be revisited at this year’s Bitcoin 2022 Conference in Miami.