Vancouver wants to have Bitcoin in reserve

Yesterday, the mayor of Vancouver, Ken Sim, publicly announced a motion proposing that the city purchase Bitcoin to hold as a reserve. 

It is not the first major city ever to do so, but it seems to be the first city in Canada to take this path. 

Vancouver: the motion to use Bitcoin as a reserve

The motion presented by Mayor Sim is explicitly titled “Preserving the city’s purchasing power through the diversification of financial resources, becoming a Bitcoin-friendly city”.

It was announced during a city council meeting held on November 26, and it will be officially presented on December 11.

Therefore, the motion technically has not yet been either presented or discussed, but only announced, and in fact, the text on which the city council will be called to express itself is not yet available. 

At this point, the details are not even known, but from the title, it can be inferred that, probably, the mayor will ask to add Bitcoin to the city’s budget, as part of efforts to diversify investments.

The proposal seems to have reached the mayor from Jeff Booth, a Canadian entrepreneur who supports Bitcoin.

The mayor Ken Sim

Kenneth Sim has been the mayor of Vancouver for two years. 

He does not appear to be an enthusiastic supporter of Bitcoin, but a few months before becoming mayor, he posted on his official Twitter profile a photograph of himself at the Miami conference on Bitcoin, expressing his excitement to learn more about the upcoming developments of Bitcoin.

The city of Vancouver itself had never explicitly committed to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but apparently now Mayor Sim wants to transform it into a Bitcoin friendly city.

It should be noted, however, that Canada, for example, is the second country in the world for crypto ATMs, surpassed only by the USA, and a good 367 of the 3,110 Canadian crypto ATMs are in Vancouver or in the vicinity of the city.

Vancouver is the third largest Canadian city by population, and in terms of the number of crypto ATMs, it is surpassed only by Toronto and Montreal. 

It is therefore a very fertile ground regarding cryptocurrencies, also due to its proximity to the border with the USA.

Sim is an entrepreneur of Chinese origin, and does not belong to any party. However, his motion seems to have a good chance of being approved, at least in theory. 

Bitcoin and the institutions

There are increasingly more institutions globally that decide to purchase or hold Bitcoin. 

The first sensational gesture in this regard was that of El Salvador, which first declared Bitcoin as legal tender in the country, and then began a continuous purchasing plan that over the years has allowed it to acquire almost 6,000 BTC, which currently have a value exceeding half a billion dollars.

Another State that has decided to own Bitcoin is Bhutan, which now has more than 12,000 (1.1 billion dollars) in its treasury. 

The state that currently holds the most is the USA, which, however, did not purchase them but seized them from various criminals. 

The fact is that, since Donald Trump promised not to sell the approximately 210,000 BTC held by the US government, transforming them into a strategic reserve, many other institutions have decided to follow the example. 

Before Vancouver, for example, it was the U.S. city of Detroit that tried to take this path, while lately it is Brazil that is trying. 

Nonetheless, to date only two other states possess more BTC than the small El Salvador, namely China and Great Britain, always thanks to seizures of assets linked to crime.