Swiss City of Zug Will Accept Bitcoin For Public Service Payments (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Slashdot reader Mickeycaskill writes: The Swiss city of Zug, famed for its financial sector and low tax rates, will accept Bitcoin as payment for public services up the value of 200 Swiss Francs.The city council hopes the use of digital currencies will help stimulate the local fintech sector and promote the region as a financial hub. If the trial is successful, the value of transactions could be increased and other towns in the canton will join in.

"We want to express our openness to new technologies," said Mayor Dolfi Muller. "We will invite FinTech companies in Zug to meet with the City Council to exchange ideas. Our goal is to provide the best environment for their development."

Comments

Electricity bills

[kav2k]

One should be able to pay electricity bills with Bitcoins.

That would give an important perspective.

Blockchain

[DrYak]

Money laundering for utilities isn't likely...

Money laundering with bitcoins in general is a bad idea.
Once again, just to remind you that the whole central modus operandi is the exact opposite of anonymity :

The whole purpose for which bitcoin was created was to eschew the need of a central authority (As opposed to credit cards - on which MasterCard and Visa have a near-monopoly - online payment processor like PayPal which are more or less the defacto standard), to avoid situations such as MasterCard and Visa deciding to freeze WikiLeaks' donations or the various snafus of PayPal. They wanted something more like cash (which can freely change hands without problems) or somehting remind a little bit the SEPA system used by european banks (you can easily and (relatively) quickly exchange money between any random accounts, as long as both banks are member of this system).
This works by instead spreading the official ledger book (aka the blockchain) accross all peers of the network. There is no such things as anonymity in the bitcoin network, everyone can check all the transations ever. On purpose. So anyone can check that all transactions seem legit and the whole network can agree on it, without the need of a central authority.

At best you have some pseudonymity: The transaction aren't expressed using real citizen identities, but using cryptographic keys (So on a quick glance, you'll transaction validated by "key 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61", not by "real identity John Doe, address: ...").
On a quick glance the real-life identity behind each cryptographic transaction isn't revealed, but isn't beyond the Big-data analysis and computing power of a well motivated State. (by following all the various "money threads" formed by all the numerous cryptographic transaction, it's possible to cluster them, and boil down to a list of potential suspects).

So money laundering using bitcoins isn't a very intelligent decision. If a state-level agency (or any other entity with access to similar level resources) decide to go after your ass, they'll find you.

Not sure it's smart to give more power to the bitcoin folk though.

Yup, indeed.
Whether in fact bitcoin managed to actually achieve independence from central authority is open to debate:
Everyone *can* indeed check the blockchain.
But currently, most of the "mining" computing power is at the hand of a few chinese guys.

This is probably safer than a lot of other uses of bitcoin.

And actually somewhat useful:
a bill paid by bitcoin is stored forever in the blockchain. It can be checked by anyone.
No risk of losing the proof of payment and getting into administrative troubles.