Financial Services Advisor

Heather Ba, assistant professor at the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri: “Countries face a different set of incentives to ban cryptocurrency mining than to ban cryptocurrency usage. Most countries ban cryptocurrency usage to preserve control over international capital flows and domestic monetary policy or out of concerns about crypto’s use by illicit criminals or political opponents. Governments might be concerned about cryptocurrency mining if it is being done to fund political or criminal activities, but more likely a government like Paraguay is concerned about crypto mining because it is energy intensive and bad for the environment. The amount of energy the world uses to run electrical infrastructure that supports data storage or cloud computing has skyrocketed in the past decade. The information age is proving…”