The Swiss town Zug has informed about its fresh new project, providing citizens with the possibility to pay for public services with bitcoin.
Zug has started this initiative during a local government hearing on May 3. The project shall start effectively from July 1, 2016 and then run through the rest of the year, according to the official statement of the town, published on its website. This project is said to be focused on increasing the efficiency through widening the payment instruments possibilities with bitcoin for public obligations that cost 200 francs or less.
The official statement informs:
“The pilot project of the city government is initially limited to a limit of 200 francs on chargeable services the residents of the city train. The end of 2016 [we will conduct] an analysis of lessons learned. Then…the city council [will decide] if bitcoins and most other digital currencies are to be accepted as payment for other urban services in the future.”
This project of using bitcoin for public payments is not the first one, albeit Zug’s plan is certainly one of those cases, where it comes to the reality and does not remain only on paper. This idea was presented over the previous years in different cases, but most of the municipalities never started to weigh it seriously for their payments.
City mayor Dolfi Müller added in a statement that introducing bitcoin for the payments is related to hope of attracting more financial tech companies to the region.
“We want to express our openness to new technologies and expressed early on your own experiences. And we will invite to exchange ideas with the City Council FinTech companies in the region train,” he stated, adding:
“Our goal is to meet their needs for optimal development in our living and economic environment in more detail.”
The official announcement can be found here.
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