US presidential candidate Andrew Yang says he’s open to the idea of utilizing Bitcoin to power his signature “Freedom Dividend” campaign proposal.
The entrepreneur and internet sensation has centered his campaign around the idea of implementing a form of Universal Basic Income – a policy where every American citizen over the age of 18 receives a monthly payment of $1,000.
Yang says the proposal is designed to mitigate the “unprecedented” future impacts of job losses due to automation.
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During his appearance on the “Off The Pill Podcast” on Sunday, an interviewer quizzed the candidate about whether he’d thought of using Bitcoin as a medium of payment for such a policy, citing the currency’s divisibility in satoshis, the smallest unit of a single Bitcoin (0.00000001 BTC).
Replied Yang,
“I love where you’re headed, because I learned a lot from my friends in the cryptocurrency community around some of these principles – it’s one reason why just about everyone in the cryptocurrency community loves the idea of Universal Basic Income or the Freedom Dividend.”
Yang, who’s been embraced by large swaths of the crypto community due to his calls for clear, innovation-encouraging cryptocurrency regulations, also spoke about his views on blockchain technology overall.
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“I have many friends in the cryptocurrency community, and I’m a believer in the underlying technology in particular.
The blockchain has a world of potential. It’s like a lot of other technologies where right now the hype sort of got a little bit overblown and ahead of itself.
But then the underlying technology is very powerful, and so what happens in these cycles, it tends to be that the hype gets in front of it and then the air comes out of the bubble, but then the reality ends up catching up over time.”
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