The city of Berkeley will convert its iconic, but abandoned Old City Hall into a data center for mining cryptocurrency, in an attempt to generate a revenue stream that can match the crushing, $2 billion unfunded liabilities of the Arreguin era.
“We’re in a huge hole,” said Mayor Arreguin, and it’s “all Shirley Dean’s fault. We have to dig deeper until we find a way out. We’re running out of things we can tax.”
Former Mayor Shirley Dean left office decades ago and Arreguin has held office for fourteen years. “I don’t want to point fingers,” he said, pointing a finger.
Stock car street racer, crypto enthusiast, and District 3 council member Ben Bartlett commented that “as a lawyer, I understand nothing about cryptocurrency. But some guys who looked pretty smart — they were wearing Allbirds and hadn’t combed their hair — told me it was pretty cool, so I figure ‘why not put our city’s future on the line?'”
Although Old City Hall continues to be a prominent icon for the city’s identity, appearing on the cover of the recent annual financial report (known to insiders as the “harbinger of doom”), the building is a seismic death trap known as a ‘pancake.’ As one expert put it, when asked, during a Council meeting in that same building, what would happen if there were a quake right then: “pancake. All dead.” Despite this dire assessment, Arreguin continues to promote the building as a warming shelter for the city’s homeless.
Mining bitcoin will require massive energy resources placing the endeavor at odds with the city’s climate objectives. Arreguin offered that the power drain would be offset by solar panels on private property. “We conducted a survey of 10 people who showed up for a weekday afternoon Peace and Justice commission meeting. All of them agreed that homeowners would gladly divert their own solar production to meet the city’s needs.”