Tax, CityCoins founder Patrick Stanley That said, it’s possible to stop being a painful civic ritual and become an exercise in freedom — if we codify and calibrate them properly. Stanley’s crypto-based invention he calls the “opportunity as opposed to obligation tax,” in which people promoting tithing for a particular city have cryptocurrency because they have faith. into the city and its mission. “They want to see the city act as an allocator of capital and they want to bet on the city’s success,” said Stanley. said in a podcast interview. They can essentially cheer the city government through millions, if not billions, of dollars in computational processing — the equivalent of a gilded “like” button.
CityCoins kicked off its first project with the city of Miami in August 2021, collecting $2.5 million in “false tax” income in its first 20 days. New York City and Austin now have their own currencies. In the CityCoins matrix, miners receive a city-specific coin, like MiamiCoin or NYCCoin, by transacting in STX, the token for Stacks, a protocol that operates on the Bitcoin network. (Stacks is also the former owner of Stanley.) In addition to the new CityCoins tokens awarded to miners, STX holders participate in Stack consensus process receive 70 percent of STX spent on mining CityCoins, while city governments receive 30 percent. Cities that are not allowed to hold crypto can instantly convert their STX gains into dollars. It is in some ways to free up money for cities: a breeze for governments that, at least in the United States, seem perennially short of cash and forced to tighten their belts. In a winning interview with Miami’s pro-crypto mayor, Francis SuarezStanley has framed CityCoins as both disruptive and deeply familiar. Cities get 30 percent of miner’s STX—no more, nothing less—because that’s the tax rate everyone in America is used to.
It’s not like the current US federal tax system is well-loved. Hollow by Intuit’s 20-year efforts to profit from Tax Day, the system that US taxpayers resent is two parts esoteric and expensive. Things are even worse for the millions of crypto holders; Federal cryptocurrency taxation is governed by a set of revenue and FAQ regulations. Emery Sheer, an accountant in Florida who runs a Youtube Channel on taxation of cryptocurrencies. Sheer said many of the FAQs that the IRS uses to clarify taxing cryptocurrencies don’t mention cryptocurrencies at all, instead covering concurrent asset classes that are also defined as assets. “We have to guess,” he said.
While Congress and the White House study the future of cryptocurrency and move toward clarity — is it an investment vehicle, digital assets, currency, the right kind of thing? Kohl’s CashOr some combination? —city-level developments like CityCoins can defeat federal legislators, reshape municipal taxes in the image of cryptocurrencies, and in the process force national policy to follow the lead. its head.
If Suarez and Stanley get their way, the launch of CityCoins, aided by crypto tax uncertainty, will signal a major shift to taxation. First, taxes could take on an entirely new form, following in the footsteps of cryptocurrencies, which are claimed to improve over their fiat predecessors while becoming another investment vehicle. But unlike fiat or other forms of crypto-assets, which require lobbyists or other settlements to shape policy, CityCoins and its ilk aim to control development. of a city, turning it into immediate political power. The “we” of the city may change in the process, no longer defined by geographical borders or body location, but by token communities and portfolio distribution.
Antiques provide a its own distributed ledger, hint Erica Robles-Anderson, a digital tax scholar. The states and empires of the city handled recto and next page physical currency as a political arena — the state holds sovereign control over the front of the coin, but local currencies will create their own symbols on the back. Trust, commitment and trust at the micro or regional level emerges based on who will accept certain tenders.
