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Oakland, California mayoral candidate Bryan Parker is seemingly no stranger to technology. He’s worked as a senior director of finance at tech firm iPass for over ten years, and now he’s hoping to use bitcoin to help the impoverished in his community.
In an interview with the SFGate said:
[blockquote style=”2″]What I’m doing is engaging in the fight on poverty, which is a big, ambitious goal. What is one of the ways you get poor people into different habits? You start getting them to save more, get them online. (Bitcoin) is a way of using modern technology that’s helpful in doing that. If I have money in the bank, I have embedded in the system a savings pattern because I have to go somewhere to get money. When you’re operating on cash, all your cash is there and it’s harder to keep track of. We’re reversing the paradigm here. I think (bitcoin) is something we can do in combination with financial literacy to drive better behavior.[/blockquote]
Parker says he views bitcoin as a tool which can allow people to better run their lives, and also thinks it’s something the government can use.
[blockquote style=”2″]One of the things people like about (bitcoin) is it’s a democratic type currency. The market is truly regulating. But you look at a couple of things that have recently happened and say, “Hey, obviously there’s got to be some regulation.” You’ve got to make sure there’s some safeguards.[/blockquote]
Parker’s idea is different from the lot of opinions the community has heard before. Many have seen bitcoin as an escape from the current financial system, whilst Parker sees the digital currency as a teaching tool.
Interesting, don’t you think?
Read the full interview at SFGate here.
Neal Palmquist 
When Democrats in California and Republicans in Texas are singing in chorus to convince voters that Bitcoin is an acceptable alternative to the world reserve currency, what is there to stop those same voters from deciding they would want an alternative to the two political parties that screwed everything up for the dollar in the first place?
California should be more worried about balancing their own state budget before making everybody else in every other state pay for California’s Bitcoin scandal. America already has a limited issuance, diminishing availability currency with no central control. That currency is the Confederate Dollar printed by the South during the Civil War. We have effectively already tried Bitcoin a very long time ago and we have seen where confederate currencies can take us. So why is it very important to California to adopt a confederate currency for use in their government?
I agree Bitcoin can be used to help ease the suffering of life in poverty because Bitcoin is a third world currency that can be used for purchase of textiles for distribution. But Mr. Parker has made no effort to convince me that there will not be forced labor operations springing up in this world. When Americans use United States Dollars to buy Bitcoins in anonymous transactions on the exchanges, Bitcoin has no power by itself to prevent a new evolution of slavery in this world that would be financed in whole by America and the City of Oakland. This idea by the candidate is willful ignorance of the effects Bitcoin and the world reserve currency can have on the lives of other innocent people in this world.
It seems to me this idea is yet another example of how Californians think it is enlightened and illuminated to purposefully do very stupid things and leave messes for everybody else around them to clean up. Watch this whole Bitcoin evangelical fever in California end up becoming a mess that burdens taxpayers in every other state for generations. As an outsider, this is a clear warning flag of the serious potential: soon every other state better be watching closely for California to be failing as a sovereign state in the near future. California clearly would rather be a nationalized province under full control of Washington D.C.