Vancouver’s Mayor, Ken Sim, is a genuine Bitcoin enthusiast who’s doing his part to get Vancouver’s city council as well as its citizens to see what he sees when it comes to Bitcoin.
And his efforts are starting to bear fruit.
On December 11, 2024, the Vancouver City Council greenlit a motion Mayor Sim prepared to start making Vancouver a more Bitcoin-friendly city.
The motion directs city staff to explore the ideas of Vancouver establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve as well as accepting taxes and city fees in bitcoin.
In my conversation with Mayor Sim, we discussed the passing of this motion as well as some of his deeper philosophical thoughts about Bitcoin.
We also touched on what Bitcoin adoption in Vancouver would look like in a perfect world, his own journey down the proverbial Bitcoin rabbit hole and why Bitcoin can bring financial hope to the citizens of Vancouver at a point in time when many are struggling to make ends meet.
The Vancouver City Council recently passed your motion to make Vancouver a more Bitcoin-friendly city.
On a personal level, though, if you could wave a magic wand and enable whatever level of Bitcoin adoption you see fit in Vancouver, what would that look like?
I’ve got to give you a caveat here. These are my own personal views. We have a pretty incredible team at the City of Vancouver, and they’ve been tasked to explore. So, it’s not as if I can really influence the team and tell them “You have to do this and that.”
In a perfect world, the first thing we would do is add to a strategic reserve. The second thing would be allowing people to transact with bitcoin without triggering capital gains tax events and to accept payments in the form of bitcoin. Tax regulation across not just Canada, but in the U.S. and a lot of other jurisdictions, still hasn’t caught up, so every time you transact with bitcoin, there’s a capital gains tax fee, which is very cumbersome.
The third thing is that we start the conversation and we bust the myths around narratives like Bitcoin is bad for the environment. That’s all hogwash, right? Bitcoin is actually going to help us save the environment.
Plus, it provides us with an immutable record and it actually adds to a level of transparency we’ve never seen in the history of humankind. Having that incorporated into our systems would be great.
You spoke about this process of educating people about Bitcoin on Natalie Brunell’s show. You said you “shower them with love and then you hit them with facts.” Can you give an example of what this looks like?
There’s a lot of resistance with Bitcoin, especially as it pertains to its perceived effects on the environment. People hear this narrative that it’s bad for the environment, and it’s like, “Well, wait a second…”
I’m an environmentalist, and I know that if you force organizations across the planet to do stuff that they aren’t incentivized to do, nothing’s going to happen. Whereas if you incentivize them — if you build in a reward system — it’s amazing.
So, what do we know? Well, we flare natural gas as a by-product of oil production, and if we actually capture that and repurpose it for Bitcoin mining, it is actually good for the environment. Same with capturing methane that seeps from the ground.
Also, with alternative or green energy sources, be it wind power or solar power, where the economics often don’t pan out to build these projects, you provide someone with a guaranteed customer in the form of Bitcoin miners, and the economics work and these things get built. So, it’s net positive for the environment.
There’s also this false narrative that nefarious things happen with Bitcoin. That’s garbage, right? Cash is untraceable. With Bitcoin, we’re talking about an immutable record where you can see every single transaction since the beginning of time and you can catch people at the on and off ramps.
Some of the narratives are actually the complete opposite of reality, and so we have to counter these narratives.
Based on my experience, it’s easy to teach someone something, while it’s a lot harder for people to unlearn, and we are in the process of helping people unlearn what they’ve learned.
You have referred to Bitcoin as the greatest invention in human history. Could you expand on that?
Our money is broken. People can’t use it to store their energy into the future. We’re on this rinse and repeat cycle. In Ray Dalio’s book The Changing World Order, he talks about the rise and fall of the Dutch empire, the rise and fall of the British empire, the rise and, as he puts it, fall of the U.S. empire. If you agree with Dalio’s perspective, the point is that the money’s broken.
We do not have a reserve currency that’s ever lasted. We keep repeating history. But Bitcoin changes all that. As we all know, you can’t mess with it, and you can’t manipulate it. It’s a game-changer and when we finally get onto the bitcoin standard — I think it’s a matter of when, not if — it’s going to change how humans interact with each other and how nation states evolve.
You just cited one of Ray Dalio’s books, and I’ve heard you discuss how you’ve also read books like The Bitcoin Standard and Layered Money. You’re also a friend of Jeff Booth’s. With all the reading you’ve done and the conversations you’ve had with Jeff, did you end up having a lightbulb moment with Bitcoin or was it more of a gradual learning process?
Well, I had the opposite of the lightbulb moment when my son Mitchell came up to me and said “Dad, I want to buy bitcoin.” And I was like, “You touch that shit, and I’m going to punch you in the throat.” Obviously, I wasn’t going to do that.
Then, I started seeing more of it and had conversations with Jeff. So, I started to look into it, read a bunch about it and went to a couple of conferences. My journey was very similar to a lot of other people’s. I was completely against it and then I warmed up to it and eventually became an evangelist.
I can’t point to any one point where it was like, “Wow, there you go” and I went 180 degrees the other way. I do remember though, I made my first $500 purchase of bitcoin on November the 14th, 2020. The reason it took me so long was I had to learn how to use the app on which I bought the bitcoin. It was all clunky — just a pain in the butt.
But I remember that day, because when I finally bought it I thought, “Did I miss out?” I think I bought it at like 16 or 17 grand and it had run from like seven or eight grand the month before. I was like, “Did I miss it?” I remember Jeff saying, “No, you’re still super early; we’re all still super early.”
You’ve talked about how unaffordable housing in Vancouver is. Does bitcoin fix this?
Yes. Let me give you an example. We have a small studio rental up in Whistler (a town north of Vancouver). When we bought it, it would have cost 17.2 bitcoin. That’s about four years ago. In terms of dollars, the property is up 36%, but in terms of bitcoin, it’s down something like 85%. As of today, it costs like 3.3 bitcoin to buy it.
By the way, I’m not giving investment advice. I’m just talking about a theoretical, if this plays out how it could. If at some point in the not so distant future, you’ll be able to buy a house in Vancouver for a bitcoin, what that means is you can literally buy a house for about US$106,000 or about CA$150,000 if you bought a bitcoin today.
I’m not telling people to take out a loan to buy bitcoin — very far from it. Go seek financial advice. But if you believe bitcoin’s price will continue to appreciate, you can literally buy a house for CA$150,000 in the near future by buying a bitcoin right now.
You’ve brought Bitcoin, a taboo subject, into the fold as Mayor of Vancouver, and you’ve said that doing so might lead to your not getting re-elected. Have you ever considered that the opposite might be true, that maybe by embracing Bitcoin the people of Vancouver will want to re-elect you?
I’m not too concerned about that. I have no desire to be a premier or prime minister. I’m not a politician, even though I’m sitting in this role, which I really honor, value and take very seriously. But the goal was never to be popular. The goal was never to get re-elected. The goal was to do what I believed is right for the future of the City of Vancouver.
And so I couldn’t sit back any longer and ignore this because I truly believe that this sets the city up for the next hundred years. Am I right? We don’t know, but we have a pretty good feeling, and I truly believe in it.
I think voters, residents — it doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you sit on — are sick of politicians who do stuff just to get re-elected. They want people to do what they believe is right, and I believe this is right. If we don’t get re-elected because of it, I can personally hold my head up high and say, “You know what? We stuck to our values and we did what’s right.” If it works out, great. I actually think it’s going to work out, though.
It seems like a progressive city like Vancouver — the first city in Canada to have a Bitcoin ATM — should be in favor of Bitcoin. However, the previous mayor tried to ban Bitcoin ATMs in the city. Was there a reaction from the Vancouver community when the mayor did this?
I didn’t follow it too closely at the time, so I don’t know. I can’t comment on it. What I can comment on is we do have a lot of politicians who will make policy up based on virtue signaling as opposed to data. We’re a data driven administration, and we care about the future prosperity of our city.
I think the distinction here is we choose to have the most impact — we’re more concerned about the steak than the sizzle. If someone can make an argument on why this is a bad idea based on data, we’ll listen to it. We might have it wrong, but I can tell you no one has been able to attack our Bitcoin stance with data.
Bitcoin can be kind of difficult to use technically. So, let’s say, in a perfect world, maybe Bitcoin becomes legal tender in Vancouver at some point, or if there’s just greater adoption of it, do you worry about the technical difficulties associated with using Bitcoin? Would the Vancouver city government ever get involved in educating its Vancouver residents about Bitcoin?
It’s not one of the core services we provide as a city, so I don’t see us going down the educational rabbit hole. We’ll leave it up to other experts.
If the industry makes Bitcoin simpler to use, so many more groups and individuals will just hop on the bandwagon. And you know it’s coming because there are a lot of people working on this right now.
I’m not an expert, but when I, when I hear about some of the things that are happening on Layer 2s and the Lightning Network, I see a future where this is seamless. When people go into a Walgreens and they buy a candy bar, they won’t think about how they’re paying with Bitcoin. All the plumbing underneath will happen without them knowing, and it’s going to revolutionize the planet.
You’ve done a handful of interviews on this topic thus far. Is there anything that we in the media haven’t asked you yet that you’d like to discuss or point out?
Yes, I’d like to make a general call out and not just for the city of Vancouver. It’s for every single city and province and state and jurisdiction and canton, and country on the planet.
We have to get the education out there, which is still a hard challenge. Some people in the media have made the comment that what we’re doing right now is more virtue signaling, because we have the hope of making this happen. This is incorrect, though.
We need Bitcoin supporters to start pumping the true narrative of why bitcoin is a sound financial asset. It’s the best performing asset in the last 16 years on the planet. And we’re not traders, so if you’re not looking to day trade, all of the volatility doesn’t matter.
We need to start getting that narrative out, but not from me, from the community. We need to let our elected officials know this because they’re not going to do anything until people hit them with data and tell our politicians that they want this.
We’re doing this because we believe in it. We want to get ahead of it. We want to set up the city for the next 100 years, and that’s why we’re willing to take political risk to do this. But we need help. So, if your audience can help us push that narrative with our provincial government and in their jurisdictions, as well, that would be great.
If people come onboard and see how bitcoin can reduce some of the financial stress in their lives, do you think Vancouver transforms into a pro-Bitcoin city relatively quickly?
Yes.
I go back to my sister-in-law, who if she watches the video she’s gonna punch me in the face. About 13 years ago, she was afraid of getting an iPhone. She didn’t understand the technology. It was a mental block.
Then, she jumped on the bandwagon like everyone else, because all her buddies had iPhones. It’s ridiculous now to think that people were afraid of iPhones, right?
Will Bitcoin give us hope? Absolutely.
I go back to the City of Vancouver and why this is so important. The City of Vancouver exists in the same conditions as everyone else does. While people can’t afford a home or they’re struggling with groceries, we have a budget.
We have to hire police officers, firefighters, engineers, and we’re living in an environment where our currency is getting debased and we can’t increase taxes at a rate that keeps up with that. We don’t want to cut services, and so Bitcoin gives us hope where we can fix our financial state, our balance sheet.
And that will actually help us run this city for the next hundred years. I think when people understand Bitcoin and they start to adopt it, they will have hope, as well, because they will realize their purchasing power is going up, which is a great thing.
