A mayoral candidate in the Texas city of Lewisville is campaigning to raise funds for the city’s police force with cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency over Taxes
Four-time mayoral candidate Winston Edmonson has proposed the launch of a municipal cryptocurrency in the city of Lewisville as a means of funding the local police force without raising taxes.
Edmonson has named his cryptocurrency “Blue Coin” and has proposed an economic model which affords residents the ability to purchase tokens from the city which may be used for goods at participating businesses. The businesses interested in accepting the cryptocurrency as payment would give a certain percentage of that transaction to the Texas city’s police force. Notes the mayoral candidate:
By saying they want to back the blue coin, they’re saying they want to give a percentage of every transaction. So basically you can think of it as a voluntary tax.
Some Lewisville business owners are already on board with the idea.
“[It’s] for the benefit of the Lewisville Police Department,” Hat Tricks owner Jason McDermott told NBCDFW. “To be honest with you, they deserve that and more.” He added:
I think that a currency that benefits the community that’s regulated by the city, who wouldn’t adopt it?
Others, like Jason Tyra — a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) in Dallas specializing in cryptocurrency — are skeptical. Tyra claims a large portion of both the city’s businesses and population would need to participate if Blue Coin stands to have any success. He told NBCDFW:
I’m not necessarily convinced upfront that Lewisville contains a critical mass of early adopters who are going to want to use this and who are also going to want to support the use case, which is the Lewisville Police Department.
Still, Tyra finds even the prospect of Blue Coin’s success in the Texas city exciting, and claims experimenting with cryptocurrency projects are the way forward. He explained:
One of the things that’s exciting about this space is that we’re so early that people have the opportunity to experiment. They have the opportunity to come up with something that doesn’t have a clear path to success just to see what happens, to throw something up against the wall. This will either work or it won’t. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, someone will think of something else.
Incumbent Mayor Rudy Durham does not support the idea of a city-sold cryptocurrency, stating, “The city should not be involved in creating any currency.”
What do you think about funding local police forces with cryptocurrency, as opposed to raising taxes? Let us know in the comments below!
Images courtesy of Pixabay and Bitcoinist archives.
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