The city of Santa Monica has opened a Bitcoin office

The Californian city of Santa Monica, in the USA, has opened a Bitcoin office. 

The city itself declared it on its official X profile. 

The opening of the Bitcoin office in the city of Santa Monica

The tweet states that on Tuesday the City Council moved forward with a partnership with 

Proof of Workforce aimed at educating the entire community about Bitcoin and trying to create opportunities and economic advantages.

The city states that its goal is to continue being a leader in innovation, staying true to the legacy of Silicon Beach. 

The opening of a Bitcoin office is directly inspired by the similar initiative from a few years ago in El Salvador.

In fact, the official X profile of the Bitcoin Office in El Salvador commented on the news saying that they can’t wait to work together with the new office in Santa Monica on Bitcoin education projects and cultural exchange.

For now, no further details are available on the initiative of the city of Santa Monica, as for now it is only a decision of the City Council regarding the partnership with Proof of Workforce.

The office of El Salvador

In El Salvador the Bitcoin Office was opened in 2022. 

This is an official initiative of the first country in the world that has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. 

Since El Salvador adopted BTC as legal tender, they had to ensure that all citizens who wanted to use it could do so easily. 

For this reason, they immediately released an official national wallet based on Lightning Network, but they also had to provide training services to the population. 

The Bitcoin Office serves precisely this purpose, namely to teach ordinary citizens how to use Bitcoin tools. 

Their official X profile states that last November they met with Lana Negrete, a member of the Santa Monica City Council, to exchange ideas and discuss educational and cultural initiatives on Bitcoin. 

On Tuesday, the same City Council of Santa Monica voted unanimously to start its own Bitcoin Office, the first after the original one in El Salvador. 

Santa Monica and Bitcoin

Santa Monica is a Californian city with 90,000 inhabitants near Los Angeles. 

It is located on the bay of the same name, and it is fundamentally a famous tourist destination. 

It is known both for being immortalized in many films and because it is home to the multinational Universal Music. 

Its beaches are especially well-known, such as the one immortalized in the famous scene from Rocky III where Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed train by running on its beach. 

In the ’70s and ’80s of the last century, it was also famous for the skateboarder community. 

Perhaps, however, the single reason it is famous is the television series Baywatch, set right on its beaches. 

So, despite being a decidedly small city, its fame goes well beyond the borders of California, and during periods of high tourist influx, it is frequented by hundreds of thousands of people. 

A Bitcoin Office potrebbe servire proprio per aiutare le persone ad approfondire la conoscenza di Bitcoin magari durante i loro periodi di vacanza. 

The USA and Bitcoin

Although it may appear that the United States of America has it in for criptovalute, in reality, it is only a political minority that is against them. 

There is indeed a cross-sectional minority that would like to rein in the crypto market, even if this minority is much more represented in the ranks of the Democratic Party of the current president Joe Biden, rather than in the Republican one. 

For example, the American exchange Coinbase was the first crypto exchange in the world to be listed on the stock exchange, in April 2021, and the USA with the Trump presidency from 2017-2020 were quite favorable towards the development of the crypto sector. 

Even Donald Trump, who initially seemed skeptical, later fully embraced cryptocurrencies after losing the 2020 elections. 

The USA would like to remain at the center of the crypto world, even though many important companies or organizations are now based in other countries. For example, the Ethereum Foundation is based in Switzerland, as is the operational headquarters of Tether. 

At this point, it is difficult to imagine that the USA really wants to let crypto companies slip away, and the Santa Monica initiative falls within this logic. 

The Silicon Beach

Santa Monica is also famous for its so-called “Silicon Beach”. 

In reality, Silicon Beach refers to the entire Westside region of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which hosts over 500 tech startups.

Here companies like Google, Facebook, AOL, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc. have offices. 

This region includes the entire western side of the Los Angeles basin south of the Santa Monica Mountains, including Santa Monica itself. 

Although it is not comparable to Silicon Valley which is south of San Francisco, in the San Jose area, it is still in California, which is the single US state with the highest GDP. 

Therefore, Santa Monica is also a technological city, even though most of the Californian crypto companies are based in Silicon Valley, such as Coinbase.

It should therefore not be surprising this propensity of the city towards innovative and revolutionary technologies such as that of cryptocurrencies.