Forgive us, but the heady prospect of Miami as a crypto hub makes us a little queasy | Editorial

Of course, Miami is embracing cryptocurrency.

This is a city built on a rose-colored vision of tourism and an unending attraction for the Next Big Thing. We’re what you might call “open-minded” here. Virtual currency? Sounds good to us.

And we’re doing it in a big way, because that’s Miami, too. We’re about to host what may be the largest cryptocurrency conference the world has ever seen this week. It’s sold out. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is speaking. So is legendary pro skater Tony Hawk. At the same time, we’re busy scraping the American Airlines name off our landmark downtown arena and slapping the name of a cryptocurrency exchange across it in a 19-year naming rights deal for a previously little-known company called FTX.

It’s an exciting time. It’s scary, too. To those of us without a Bitcoin to our names, it feels kind of unreal.

Don’t get us wrong. We hope cryptocurrency — and the flashing neon welcome mat we’ve set out for the tech industry — elevate this city to new prosperity. We’d love it if this heady new world has real staying power, especially if it can provide the fuel for the gritty, unglamorous things this city needs, like affordable housing, ways to combat sea level rise and better transportation. We hope virtual currency and the underlying blockchain technology provide scads of jobs in this community. Just don’t blame us for being a bit wary.

Because Miami has history, folks. We’ve been a smugglers’ paradise, the epicenter of the cocaine trade, a mecca for money laundering, ground zero for mortgage fraud, home to the biggest Medicare black market in the United States. When the “frothy” housing bubble burst in 2007, Miami’s overheated market got hurt badly.

These days, Miami is a grown-up city with plenty to offer. We don’t need to be dazzled by every high-flying tech company that comes along. This time around, we’d like to hear less about potential and more about proof.

Here’s one example: Axios and LinkedIn reported that Miami’s tech workforce grew faster in the past year than that of any other major metro area, though the absolute size of the workforce remains small. Overall, that’s good news.

But there are also niggling worries that trigger us a little. Cypto may not be quite as hot as it once was. Adam B. Levine, a managing editor at online crypto publication CoinDesk, told Miami Herald reporter Rob Wile that while he thinks Miami’s rising status in the crypto world is “real,” he noted that some of that comes from being a party town that was “open” when other cities were shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Other cities are opening up now.

And the price of a single Bitcoin, meanwhile, has fallen from more than $60,000 in April to under $40,000.

“Crypto goes through this every couple of years,” Levine told the Herald. “There are signs this cycle may be different — but it’s not so different because you have a lot of opportunities coming out of the woodwork, and while some of those are good, a lot are bad and turn out to be scams. . . . In the past, Miami has been associated with that, too.”

That’s our point. As Miami Mayor Francis Suarez continues to push Miami as a crypto hub, we hope he’s studied our history. We worry about going through another boom-and-bust cycle or a wave that crashes and takes us all down with it. If we’re staking the city’s future on this, please, let’s not repeat the past.

This story was originally published June 2, 2021 at 6:08 PM.