Perianne Boring: Busting the Biggest Bitcoin Myths

Today, Commander Divine speaks with Perianne Boring, founder and president of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the world's largest trade association representing the blockchain industry. Perianne’s mission is to advocate and educate the public and lawmakers about the future of blockchain. In this episode, Perianne busts some of the biggest myths about the cryptocurrency space, including Russian sanctions, environmental impact, and more.

 Key Takeaways:

Myth #1: Bitcoin is bad for the environment. It currently takes 189 terawatts to mine Bitcoin.This is about .1% of the world's energy production. And, over 60% of the energy going to mine Bitcoin is coming from sustainable sources. (We’re also starting to see use cases where crypto mining can actually help stabilize the energy grid.) The energy used to mine Bitcoin is a small fraction of the emissions that are created to mine gold, power our financial sector and support our military sector.

Myth #2: Russia is using crypto to evade sanctions. There's a current narrative that says Russians are flocking to crypto to evade sanctions. But there is no evidence of that, and there is nothing that would lead us to believe that that would ever be the case in the future. Since Russia entered Crimea in 2014, they've been working to sanction-proof their economy and diversify out of US dollar reserves. 

Crypto was not a part of their like sanction-proofing strategy at all. Even if they wanted to start using crypto for illicit finance, law enforcement has significant tools to track and trace the flow of cryptocurrencies, due to the open-source nature of blockchains. Even the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network put out a statement saying that we are not seeing crypto used for sanctions evasion.  Myth #3: Crypto is used for money laundering. .05% of crypto transaction volume has been linked to illicit activity. The open-source data shows us that illicit finance using crypto is not common. And it's also decreasing as a percentage and a portion of the markets. Myth #4: Crypto is going to be shut down by the government. Perianne believes we’ve already won the regulatory battles. It’s already been decided that we're going to allow this technology to thrive in the United States. There are absolutely no efforts, indications, or even a legal path forward to flat out ban cryptocurrency.

The conversations that are happening on the regulatory front are negotiations between the industry and the regulators on what regulatory frameworks look like. There certainly will be winners and losers in those conversations, but those are winners and losers between different companies and platforms in the space, not the technology itself. The case for this technology has been made, and we're seeing that play out on the global stage right now. 

Myth #5: It’s too late to invest in Bitcoin. It’s not too late to get in if you want to. We are still in incredibly early days, and there's a lot of opportunity. (This is not investment advice.

Just Perianne’s own opinion!) We are living in a currency experiment. For most of human history, we’ve used objects of scarcity as money – salt, stones, shells. After that, we used a gold standard for thousands of years. It wasn't until the 1980s that all industrialized nations moved to a fiat system. This is the first time in world economic history that all industrialized nations are using a currency that is only backed by the full faith and credit of the government. 

Our current economic inflation and collapse is the aftermath of this shift. Perianne believes we're coming back to our original principles of having a sound monetary system, and that Bitcoin could potentially be the path to get there. Bitcoin is the new gold. Bitcoin is a store of value, which means it’s playing the role gold has played in portfolios for many decades. The Fed Chairman himself, Jerome Powell,...

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