Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has confirmed the city will advance a plan to pay city workers in bitcoin as part of his push to make the Florida city a major cryptoasset hub.

The highly anticipated parachain auctions, which will allocate slots to projects building on the Polkadot network, is set to kick off on November 11, although some changes to the schedule are still possible.

The United States has become the world’s largest Bitcoin mining market with a 35.4% share of the global hashrate - following a mass exodus of miners from China after the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency mining and other activities.

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Top stories in the Crypto Roundup today:

• Miami Is Moving Forward With Paying City Employees in Bitcoin
• Polkadot to Debut Highly-Anticipated Parachain Auctions
• U.S. Becomes Largest Bitcoin Mining Market
• The First Bitcoin Transactions
• Sponsored: Grab Up to 600 BIT on Bybit — And Be Part of BitDAO

Miami Is Moving Forward With Paying City Employees in Bitcoin

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez has confirmed the city will advance a plan to pay city workers in bitcoin as part of his push to make the Florida city a major cryptoasset hub. In an interview, Suarez said:

"We're going for a request for proposal in October to allow our employees to get paid in bitcoin, to allow our residents to pay for fees in bitcoin and even taxes potentially in bitcoin if the county allows it.”

In February, a formal solicitation was made after the city commissioners backed his resolution to direct the city manager to procure a vendor to offer employees the ability to receive a percentage of their salary in bitcoin.

Suarez also wants the city to hold bitcoin on its balance sheet but statutes at the state and federal levels do not currently allow cryptocurrencies to be owned by municipalities.

Polkadot to Debut Highly-Anticipated Parachain Auctions

The highly anticipated parachain auctions, which will allocate slots to projects building on the Polkadot network, is set to kick off on November 11, although some changes to the schedule are still possible.

The date was set through a governance vote and will kick off an important milestone for Polkadot, helping it realize its vision for an interconnected blockchain framework. Parachains, it’s worth noting, have been running successfully on Polkadot’s live “canary” network Kusama.

As on Kusama, each seven-day auction on Polkadot will have a starting period of one day and 21 hours followed by a five-day ending period. Bidding ends on the seventh day, with the moment of the auction’s closure being determined on-chain. The winners of the auctions are expected to be projects with the most community support.

While on Kusama auction winners were immediately onboarded, the first five projects to win auctions on Polkadot would be onboarded simultaneously on December 15. Each auction on Polkadot will assign a parachain slot for a total of 96 weeks.

U.S. Becomes Largest Bitcoin Mining Market

The United States has become the world’s largest Bitcoin mining market with a 35.4% share of the global hashrate - following a mass exodus of miners from China after the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency mining and other activities.

Kazakhstan and Russia come behind the United States with 18.1% and 11% of the global hashrate, according to new data from Cambridge University. Michel Rauchs, Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance’s digital assets lead, said:

"The immediate effect of the government-mandated ban on crypto mining in China was a 38% drop in global network hash rate in June 2021 - which corresponds roughly to China's share of hash rate before the clampdown, suggesting that Chinese miners ceased operations simultaneously.”

Before China’s crypto mining ban, in April 2021, the United States only had 16.8% of the global hashrate, meaning the American market share rose 105% since then. Kazakhstan and Russia saw their shares grow 120% and 61% respectively.

The First Bitcoin Transactions

The first Bitcoin transaction occurred days after the cryptocurrency was created to test how the blockchain worked. From that point on, BTC evolved to see its first commercial transaction months later: a now-famous pizza purchase.

The first Bitcoin block – called the genesis block – was mined on January 3, 2009, by the cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto. On January 12, the first Bitcoin transaction was made, involving Nakamoto and Hal Finney, a cypherpunk that worked with the PGP Corporation developing a leading encryption product.

CryptoCompare’s latest guide digs into the history behind both the first-ever BTC transactions and the cryptocurrency’s first commercial transaction. Read all about it.

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