Topic: Swiss City of Lugano to Make Bitcoin Legal Tender (Read 448 times)

There were some state in the US that has also made the same purpose for bitcoin, to be used as payment for tax purposes.

People are always thinking about the recovery of bitcoin from where it came from on its former ATH. Looking on it at the moment is lovely as it's moving up gradually and not dropping surprisingly.

If we connect the two things, your statement is indeed rational, even many corrupt countries are the most loyal customers of Swiss banks, so with this new policy, whoever the partner is, it's actually the same, only now the partner is Tether.  Hopefully the project goes smoothly so that BTC continues to experience recovery to reach its ath moment.

Fantastic,

this are running very well or Bitcoin in Lugano.

Site has been updated, looks like they are starting to work.

Come on! This is marketing bbg material, you have to be a little bit bullish eh?

Regarding tether, I am sorry I cannot provide a translation for Ardoino’s chat with the guys at bip.com, but he mentioned the fact they are helping the city of Lugano with their initial setup, but they have no monopoly of the plan, so if other competitors want to join in the city will be happy to have more than one partner.

At least, in theory…

Well. Aren't the Swiss the traditional, secretive bankers for almost every single entity that has billions of worth of black money earned from questionable sources. On top of that, they have been pioneers in this. A "Swiss account" is synonymous with ill-gotten wealth of monarchs and political leaders for every single developing country in the world.

Tether has been questioned multiple times about the validity of it printing tether and buying crypto off of Bitfinex. This means that they have quite a lot of "fiat wealth" to be taken care of. It should come as no surprise if they choose a Swiss city for this purpose.

Overall though, this should be seen as a positive in terms of crypto and the part about use of Lightning Network.

I raised an eyebrow at the 10 000 merchants in a city of 65 000 population, but whatever one doesn't have to be based there I assume.
But they've lost me completely when I clicked on the "Work for Plan ₿" which leads to:
https://tether.recruitee.com/o/project-manager-luganos-plan
So this is a full scale tether operation making use of bitcoin's popularity.

Ok, good for you Foletti, back to Salvador! Quite funny, one of the few Italian words I know came to my mind while reading his name, follia.
And from that now I'm looking over the internet to see where I can get these "Forno Battistini Biscotti Froletti Integrali"  that ended up in my search results

As all update on the matter:

https://planb.lugano.ch/

Here you can have details and updates on all the plan, initiatives and developments on the unfolding of Lugano Plan B.

To answer both why I'm not really convinced it will be as some imagine.

First, you can already pay with bitcoins in shops in Europe, and in Switzerland alone, we have enough cases to date of businesses accepting bitcoin for payments, it's not a new thing, you don't have to declare it legal tender in order to achieve that.
Second, the definition of legal tender varies from country to country, you maybe have seen maybe those signs all over the US with "Cash only", so despite you having dollars on your credit/debit card and the dollar being obvious legal tender nobody is forced to accept them as means of payment, in Sweden, there are shops who are not taking cash anymore, in Salvador is completely different, merchants were forced to accept payments via Bitcoin so you couldn't refuse it.
And even in Salvador merchants can opt for the BTC to be converted directly in $,  so the whole debate about making it legal tender is useless until we see the applicable law, and we're talking here about a city, not a country. That's why I said it, take it with a grain of salt because it might not be what you wish for.

Yeah that is right. That is what legal tender do, to make use of bitcoin directly to buy goods without needing to convert to fiat or any other cryptocurrencies. It's a good news but the op is not convinced somehow for some reasons maybe because the statement is not only about using btc as a legal tender but there is some extra rule about it but they didn't say something about btc being converted to usdt by the time you made a payment.

Maybe they too make tether as a legal tender along with btc but if ever what you said is going to happen, it's not going to be a difficult thing since there are now lots of services that do the conversion job.

Switzerland is a huge nation and they are in Europe as well, it would be difficult for them to accept something like that right away. I am not saying that they can't, or they won't because I believe that based on what happens, they may actually do it in the future. However, it is harder and more difficult to do it for a whole nation.

But, isn't that lovely? I mean when it was El Salvador they said that it was a small nation and ran by some corrupt person and attacked it endlessly. Now it is a Swiss city, lets see what they will say about it. I believe even Miami could do that soon, mayor is working hard to make it true but laws make it harder for him.

So it will soon be possible to pay for purchases in shops in this city with bitcoin? That's certainly good news, especially from a developed country like Switzerland. The only thing I don't understand is whether it has anything to do with the Tether partnership. If I understand correctly, bitcoin will be converted into USDT which equals 1:1 to the dollar. Or does the bitcoin remain bitcoin and goes to the BTC address? If not, it's a tricky business for Tether.

For me, I think that’s a good thing for Lugano (a Swiss City) to embrace cryptocurrencies by making it as a legal tender and to introduce crypto taxes. But this is just the city alone, and not the entire country. Imagine if the whole country would do this instead of the city alone. It would be huge of course, just like in El Salvador.

But of course, there are some concerns such as the usage of Bitcoin. If they are going to use the Lightning Network, the transaction fees aren’t concerning at all.

It is definitely a good news whenever bitcoin gets accepted in more places. It is obvious that we will rarely see any kind of change in the approach from other places just because of this, but it is not impossible neither. I believe this could have been even more promoted after the El Salvador deal.

I am not saying that they did it because El Salvador did it, but they were probably looking at doing it anyway, and then El Salvador doing it ended up being the key thing that they looked at and they saw that it helped them. Now this is probably a richer place than El Salvador, even if it is just a city, and I think they could do a lot better job.

So far this news has only been coming from the side of polygon? Are there any legit sources that they are making Bitcoin legal tender? The article points to the supposed plans of Lugano but nowhere does it say anything about Bitcoin becoming legal tender there. In fact, I very much doubt a single city can make that kind of decision by itself. The entire government would have to weigh in. In fact, thats where the first news would come from.

Nonetheless, I will keep an eye out on the development...

Which makes me believe there are benefits we don't yet see. Legalizing Tether gives me the impression that there are some really shady things going on.

It doesn't want to be dependent of the USD, but it wants USDT which is a stable coin of USD with an extra layer of centralization? Nope, that's definitely not the case.

Making bitcoin legal tender is a big thing to be done by centralized governments. El Salvador took a very strong decision against opposition from different organisations and countries. The credit goes to the president Nayib Bukele, because he was strong in his decision and when more leaders criticised his decision. Swiss City Laguna's plan for making bitcoin legal tender is not a big thing in my view, because Switzerland is already a crypto friendly country.

i was there, it was amazing.

El Salvator is a developing country, Lugano is the third financial center of Switzerland, there is a big difference.  They are planning to create the whole ecosystem to make bitcoin to succeed, not only by adopting it as a de facto legal tender but also by planning all of the interventions as per the list below. Do that in a big financial center like Lugano, and be sure that things are just going to explode for btc.

A summary:

Very well organized institutional event with a turnout of at least 600/700 people (after 2 years of restrictions I was no longer used to it). I have seen many people in the sector but also many new and curious faces.

Summary by points:
- Bitcoin, USDT and Luga (a local token pegged to the cent of a franc) will be legal tender in Lugano. For BTC it will use Lightning Network, for the other Polygon in order to minimize the impact of fees)

- you can pay taxes, buy things and services with BTC / USDT / LUGA (at the moment over 200 businesses have joined)

- 3 million francs have already been allocated to help local companies gear up to accept crypto

- 100 million will be allocated to attract crypto companies from abroad

- there will be 500 scholarships to train professional figures in the crypto world (dev, compliance, customer care)

- space will be created for 25 startups in the crypto world

- a mining project will start that will use electricity from 100% renewable sources

- on 26/27/28 October there will be a 3-day event in Lugano. The Bitcoin World Forum


Recording of the event (Eng/ita) : https://youtu.be/Zfh-oOlt03I

I agree that this is a very strange decision of the city authorities, but obviously, the guys who pull the strings with Tether know their business, because they successfully use Bitcoin not only in this case but also in El Salvador when it comes to their Bitcoin City - it doesn't seem like a coincidence at all.

In addition, Lugano has announced its stablecoin (LVGA), so we wonder if Bitocin will be relevant at all, if we know that proponents of stablecoins will advocate for their projects because they are cleaner for the environment and cheaper for transactions. If you ask me, Bitcoin is used here only to promote some completely different projects, but time will best show in which direction the whole thing will go.

Anything that has to do with the development of BTC in countries is definitely welcomed especially if we see that countries are starting to see its potential and widespread use.

In the event that Lugano does indeed accept BTC as a form of payment for taxes, then that will be the start of potential implementations in the future. Its development and use has to start somewhere- and they chose for the payment of taxes, which implies that the government recognizes its use and capability in their future transactions.

I just hope that countries would soon adopt and use this as an example in order to integrate cryptocurrencies in our day-to-day transactions.

I'm always happy to see cryptocurrencies getting mainstream recognition and acceptance.
I am curious, why this city out of the other Swiss cities though? What factored into this decision?