Reports are surfacing this week that New York City is mulling over the idea of allowing residents to pay city fines and fees with the peer-to-peer decentralized virtual currency bitcoin. Although it suggests greater adoption of the digital currency from the mainstream, is this just another way of extracting money from its population at a time of fiscal crises?
Democratic Manhattan Councilman Mark Levine proposed the measure in a bill that would see the city embark upon new agreements with financing agencies to allow New York to accept bitcoins. He says this would be a groundbreaking proposal, especially among the tech-savvy millennial generation.
Levine believes it would help the city be on the “cutting edge” of technology and save taxpayers millions of dollars in credit card fees.
If the legislation is passed then it would make New York the very first city – many other metropolitan areas in the United States have considered the concept but haven’t moved forward with the proposals – to accept bitcoin for payments like parking tickets, court fees and other fines that New Yorkers face on a daily basis.
This is rather disingenuous because it’s not so much about helping bitcoin enter the mainstream of things. Instead, it could help the city generate more revenues from the future generation (remember, bitcoiners have fun paying for stuff with the cryptocurrency). This comes at a time when the City that Never Sleeps faces a $110 billion municipal debt.
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