In November, Miami mayor Francis Suarez — who has vowed to make his city the crypto capital of the world — announced that he was taking his next paycheck in Bitcoin.
Not to be outdone, then-newly elected New York City mayor Eric Adams tweeted that he would be taking his first three paychecks and throwing them into the cryptocurrency pool.
“In New York we always go big, so I’m going to take my first THREE paychecks in Bitcoin when I become mayor,” Adams tweeted. “NYC is going to be the center of the cryptocurrency industry and other fast-growing, innovative industries! Just wait!”
And then it all went to pot. For both men.
On Jan. 21, Adams, Suarez, and the rest of the world watched as cryptocurrency tanked, taking a 47% nosedive from its all-time high in November. Folks didn’t lose their shirts; they lost their pants, shoes, socks and underclothes.
Just look at Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., who elected to take his $750,000 salary in Bitcoin. It was a huge gamble that hasn’t paid off. After Bitcoin’s crash, Beckham would net somewhere around $35,000 off that salary if he cashed in now. Don’t worry about poor Odell though — he still has several team-based incentives that could net him some $3 million this year, so he’s going to be fine.
But for the paycheck-to-paycheck workers who can’t gamble a year’s worth of pay on what essentially amounts to Monopoly money, cryptocurrency has become a pipe dream or a mythical golden ticket to wealth and financial freedom that might as well be about as real as a 7-Eleven in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Some Black people truly believe that cryptocurrency is a bridge to close the wealth gap, or that it has the magical ability to undo years of redlining — which effectively ruined property values for Black people — and the economic impact of racism in financial institutions.
In 2021, Time magazine covered the Black Blockchain Summit on Howard University’s campus. This was…
