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June 20, 2020
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10 Cryptocurrency Myths (And Facts to Take Them Down)

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Permission
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Cryptocurrency is no longer new. To be honest it wasn’t new even a few years ago before cryptomania launched Bitcoin into the stratosphere.

Consequently, you might have thought that most of the cryptocurrency myths, misinformation, and flat-out wrong ideas that have orbited around crypto would have evaporated by now.

But no. Many still persist.

Perhaps this blog post will help to lay some of these myths to rest.

Myth 1: Crypto is not secure.

Blockchain technology has its tenth birthday this year in October if you measure its birth from the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original paper. If you measure it from the release of the software, it occurs in January next year. Either way, the technology is nearly ten years old, is considered unbreakable (at least until quantum computers grow tall), and has never been successfully hacked.

The crypto-is-insecure lie is fake news formed from a chain of successful crypto-heists. Here are the most notable:

  1. Mt. Gox Version 1.0: In 2011, a hacker using an unidentifiable user account made off with 25,000 Bitcoin, worth half a million in those days, and much more now. (Wallet security is much improved since those days.)
  2. Silk Road, The Sequel: The feds closed the Silk Road in October 2013, and a doppelganger site appeared as if from nowhere. Sadly the security was not as good as the original. A hacker blew through it and cleaned it out to the tune of $2.7 million.
  3. The Sheep Marketplace: The Sheep Marketplace opened at the same time as Silk-Road-the-Sequel, surviving a little longer before a marauding hacker got his hands on some ill-gotten gains. This was an epic heist, 96,000 Bitcoins worth about $56.4 million and the hacker had the cheek to manipulate user account balances so that it looked like nothing had happened.
  4. Mt. Gox Version 2.0: After February 2014 when Mt. Gox finally shut its doors, 744,408 Bitcoin, worth $436 million) were missing. This hack had the added impact of crashing the price of Bitcoin.
  5. The Pony Botnet: A botnet using trojan malware called Pony stole vast numbers of login credentials from 700,000 accounts, 85 of which had Bitcoin wallets. The hacker emptied them to the tune of $220,000.
  6. The Demise of the DAO: The first smart contract on Ethereum was not so smart. It served the DAO (a Decentralized Autonomous Organization) and had a bug, The hacker who hacked it spirited away about $55 million. As a side effect, the Ether community forked the blockchain, but the crypto stayed stolen.

In every case, the crypto stayed stolen, but none of this can be blamed on a blockchain technology problem.

Myth 2. Cryptos are a scam, a shakedown — a Ponzi scheme, no less.

Ok, there have been many crypto-based fraudulent schemes. The most frequent and successful scam is the “Exit Scam”. It works like this:

  1. Dream up a crypto idea that sounds feasible and claim it will print mountains of money for investors.
  2. Create a website, complete with cool artwork, a well-written white paper, impressive-sounding advisers, and a product roadmap.
  3. Launch ICO.
  4. When ICO completes, take the money and run.

Here are some examples:

  1. Pincoin Token: A team of 7 Vietnamese entrepreneurs promised constant returns to investors. They launched an ICO and reaped $660 million from about 32,000 suckers. They even paid out a little to the investors before they did a moonlight flit. They have not been heard of since.
  2. Benebit: What do you think of this idea: let’s unify all customer loyalty programs? Brilliant, eh? Sorry, but it’s too late to invest. The ICO is over, and the company behind it has evaporated, along with an estimated $4 million — demonstrating a distinct lack of customer loyalty.
  3. PonziCoin: This earns itself a mention; barefaced branding at its best. It billed itself as “the world’s first legitimate Ponzi scheme”. It was a prank website. It even included a public admission that it was a scam. Amazingly this didn’t stop morons from pouring money into it. It raised over $250,000. What was the founder supposed to do? Naturally, cash in hand, he made a sharp exit.

A March 2018 study by the Satis Group, estimated that of all the large recent ICOs, a solid 81% were “frauds”, 6% failed, 5% are clinically dead, and only 8% made it to market.

Wait a minute. If that’s the case, how is this a Myth?

Terminological inexactitude, dear reader. It should have read: ICOs are frequently a scam, a shakedown — a Ponzi scheme, no less.

That’s why the SEC has pretty much called a halt to US ICOs. The point is that ICOs, not fully functional cryptocurrencies, are dangerous investment vehicles.

Myth 3. Cryptos have no real value.

“Give me a break, Krugman,” he said, (imagining he was berating NYT columnist Paul Krugman) “dollars, euros, and quetzals have as little real value as Bitcoin or Ether. Their value is linked to diddly-squat.”

In contrast, there are more than a few cryptos that link to genuine gold. Here is a list of those currently being traded: AurumCoin, DigixGlobal, GoldMint, HelloGold, KaratBank, PureGold, Xaurum, AurusGold, and OneGram Coin.

There are also ten not-yet-fully-ICOed gold-based cryptos: GoldCrypto, Golden Currency, XGold Coin, GoldMineCoin, BaselBit, AgAu, Darico, Gold Bits Coin, Flashmoni, and Sudan Gold Coin.

The real difference between fiat currency and crypto is that the crypto supply is governed by contract, whereas the fiat supply is in the corruptible hands of human beings.

And, if you want gold-backed money, where else are you going to get it?

Myth 4. Cryptos are for criminals and denizens of the dark web.

There are some advantages to using cryptocurrency for some criminal activities. It’s normal for hackers that spread ransomware to demand payment in Bitcoin. The now-defunct Silk Road did business in Bitcoin, selling drugs, medical supplies, and contraband. It meant that the money didn’t have to travel through a bank account — and for the bad guys that’s the most useful feature of Bitcoin.

In truth, Bitcoin is dominated by legitimate use. It is held as a pure investment, and as a safe store of money. Decentralization and “pseudo-anonymity” are features criminals like, but so do people living in economically unstable environments. If you cannot trust local banks because of corruption, or if the country you live in is unstable (think Venezuela) it’s a good place to store your stash of cash.

In the US, if you put your money in the bank and it fails, then you are insured (by FDIC) only up to a loss of $250,000. If you want to hold a larger amount then Bitcoin works fine. Bitcoin also sees heavy use on crypto exchanges as a unit of value to measure other crypto.

There is far more criminal use of the dollar: for money laundering, for drug trafficking, for bank robbery, and so on, than occurs with Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency.

Myth 5. The use of crypto is anonymous.

Not so much. A computer security professional I know recently told me that the NSA had copied and analyzed the Bitcoin blockchain and was able to tie back almost all the Bitcoin wallets that exist to their owners. I have no idea whether this is true, but it would not surprise me — because it’s possible.

The point is that Bitcoin is an open ledger so you can tie the wallet addresses to amounts of Bitcoin. If you can tie the wallet address to an individual, you’ve got full knowledge of their holding, and their trades. And most ways to get Bitcoin, through an exchange of any kind, involves you providing identifying details.

You can get into bitcoin in anonymous ways, by buying it on the street through Local Bitcoin traders. There are also three coins; Dash, Monero, and Zcash that allow anonymous trading, so you could achieve anonymity through them. But they are the exception. The majority of crypto transactions are on the record.

Contrast this with paper money, such as dollar notes. These are truly untraceable, and hence they are far better than crypto for bad guys with money to hide.

Myth 6: The government is coming for your crypto.

Excuse me please, but no government has the power to shut down a cryptocurrency; blockchains are international and decentralized. Add in the fact that wealthy investors (the good, the bad, and the ugly) use store some of there stash in Bitcoin or Ether — and such people have political influence — and it’s game over, almost.

A government can make crypto illegal. And that’s what some economically-unsophisticated countries have done. When they do, it drives the currency underground and shops are not able to accept it.

Here’s a list of the economically-unsophisticated: Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Macedonia, Nepal. That’s just 6 out of 195, which is not bad for crypto. (Perhaps I should include Vietnam and Indonesia; both allow crypto speculation, but banned payments using crypto.)

Banning crypto will backfire spectacularly, stifling a whole sunrise industry until the sorry government finally realizes you can’t stop a technology tide.

As for the US, America is not going to ban crypto. No chance. Wall St is deeply in love again. And it’s the first time since it flashed its eyes at derivatives.

Myth 7: With crypto, you will pay no taxes.

Not exactly. Of course, politicians fantasize about banning crypto, even though they realize it’s a numbskull scheme. They fear crypto will deliver a simple means of skipping all taxes and the public purse will suddenly be empty. (Who then would pay their wages?)

The good news is that their fears may be well-founded. Crypto will probably provide ways to anonymize your money. The bad news is that our beloved politicians will quickly shift the burden of taxation to things that can be taxed, like everything you buy and stuff you cannot hide (land, property, yacht, etc.).

This tax switch will be disruptive, but it is inevitable whether you approve or not.

At the moment, the tax situation surrounding crypto varies. In most countries (including the US) crypto is treated as a commodity on which you pay capital gains tax if you speculate successfully. Blockchains are a public record, so where there’s a record of you putting money in, there is a record of your ownership. The taxman can know, and you risk his wrath if you try to hide your profits.

Myth 8: Can’t buy me much, yeah, everybody tells me so.

Some crypto-skeptics still believe crypto will never amount to much, although there are fewer than there were — culled perhaps, by the astronomic rise in crypto last year and Wall St obvious passion for its new financial mistress. Ripple in particular silenced many crypto-atheists when it announced that upwards of a hundred banks were using the Ripple network.

The crypto-skepticism transferred itself to the tokens that are not in the payments business. There are hundreds if not thousands of these. Some focus on computer infrastructure (the crypto cloud), some on the ad market, some on gaming, some on gambling, some on retail, some on the supply chain, and many on the health sector. Btw, my health sector favorite is Dentacoin. It makes me laugh just thinking about this crypto tooth-fairy.

I’ve always hated dentists, why would I ever buy their crypto?

The reason none of this seething mass of crypto tokens has made the news yet is that it’s too early. It will happen. Give it a year or two, and there will be dozens, or hundreds — maybe even bajillions.

Myth 9: Cryptos are a fad that will fade.

This myth is exploded by what’s written above and already lies in pieces. However, let me amplify it a little. I work for a crypto company (Algebraix). We began writing code in July 2017. We now have an application in Beta, and the Permission token (ticker: ASK) will be operational when the beta test is complete. The marketing campaign to recruit users will probably begin about a year after we started coding. The current roadmap runs for several years from then.

Now take a look at the history of, say, Facebook. In the first year after the software launched (2004), it acquired 1 million users. In the second year 5.5 million. It was not until the end of 2008 that it had 100 million and pretty much everyone knew its name. And Facebook is an example of very rapid growth.

The day has only just dawned. The flowers have yet to open.

Myth 10: Crypto is bad for the environment.

There is nothing worse in the eyes of a millennial than being utterly ungreen. Climate skeptics they are not, especially those who consult the evidence.

Thus a tremor ran through the crypto community when the news broke that Bitcoin mining squanders the electricity of 90 million refrigerators every day, or about as much as Ireland. It is excessive, even if you note that Bitcoin has a market cap of $160 bn — because that’s only half the GNP of Ireland and significantly less than Ireland’s money supply ($257 bn).

So shame on you Bitcoin.

We could protest: “Not so fast, Buster. If Bitcoin mining didn’t make a profit, no-one would do it.”

And that is also true. However, it doesn’t alter the fact that Bitcoin mining chews up huge amounts of electricity — necessitating the burning of vast amounts of fossil fuel — pushing unconscionable tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — needlessly heating up the planet — melting the ice on Greenland and Antarctica, and raising the sea level to the point where Venice is unsavable. And I quite like Venice.

The truth is that the energy consumption of fiat currency is just as egregious and that the energy consumption of gold mining is more than twice as much and don’t talk to me about the cost of all those cloud data centers.

But that’s not the whole story. The whole crypto world knows that Bitcoin mining is expensive. So many other coins have found cheaper ways to organize their blockchains — ways that are hundreds of times cheaper than Bitcoin mining. (I’ll write an article on this one day soon).

Ultimately, either those other cryptos will dominate, or Bitcoin will become less of an electricity glutton.

The Net Net

You can think of this as a living blog post if you like. If you encounter any cryptocurrency myths which we do not mention above and which we have not yet slain, why not contact us and let us know.

If you do we will dispatch one of our mythbusters to hunt it down and dispatch it.

Recent articles

Your ASK Wallet, Now Powered by Coinbase

Sep 22nd, 2026
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We've partnered with Coinbase to bring best-in-class wallet technology to our community.

Today we're updating the technology that powers your ASK wallet. Here's what's changing, what it means for you, and what stays exactly the same.

What's changing

We've moved your Permission wallet to Coinbase's platform. What that means in plain language is this: starting today, you are in full control of your ASK. When you click to send, redeem, or manage your balance, the transaction happens from your account, signed by your login. We no longer hold your wallet keys. Coinbase does, on your behalf, under your authority.

We chose Coinbase's embedded wallet specifically because it brings institutional-grade security to our users without requiring you to manage anything yourself. The infrastructure is Coinbase's. The wallet is yours.

Beyond the custody change, our users now have a wallet that can go wherever they go: exportable, cross-chain ready, and backed by a platform that serves millions of people around the world. We're proud to bring that to our community.

What it means to control your own keys

As Permission has grown, we felt strongly that your funds should be held by a platform built specifically for that purpose, with the security standards and regulatory rigor that come with it. Moving to Coinbase's embedded wallet reflects that commitment.

With today's change, Coinbase secures your private key inside their systems, and only your Permission login can authorize transactions. When you click to send or redeem ASK, the transaction is authorized by you, through your login. We are no longer part of that process.

What this means practically: your wallet operates on its own, independent of Permission. Treat your Permission login like you would a bank password. It is now the key to your wallet. If you ever want to take your wallet entirely outside of Permission, Coinbase supports key export and that option is yours.

What Coinbase sees

Because Coinbase is now part of the infrastructure, your email address, account identifier, and wallet information are shared with them for the purpose of operating the wallet. For details on how Coinbase handles this data, you can review their embedded wallet documentation and their privacy information.

For how Permission handles your data, our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy govern that relationship, as they always have.

What stays the same

Everything you experience in the app. Earning ASK, redeeming it, transferring it, viewing your balance, managing your family. None of that changes.

And, what does change, we're excited about: key export, cross-chain support, and institutional-grade security. These are capabilities that would have taken years to build in-house and that Coinbase has spent that time perfecting. We chose to partner with the best-in-class, and our product and users will be better for it.

If you have questions, support is always here.

The Permission Team 🤝

What Is Family Friendly AI™?

Sep 9th, 2026
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Only 15% of people globally say they trust AI systems, and 72% of parents are concerned about AI’s impact on their children.

AI is quickly becoming part of everyday family life, but Big Tech wasn’t built with families in mind. Family Friendly AI is technology intentionally designed for families, giving parents visibility into their children’s digital lives, guidance when they need it, and tools to encourage positive behavior.

5 Things That Make AI Family Friendly

1. Your family owns its data.

‍Your family’s data is never sold. It belongs to your family, and you stay in control of it.

2. Parents know what’s happening online.

‍Family Friendly AI gives parents visibility into their children’s digital lives, helping them fully understand how their children use and interact with technology.

3. It motivates children with rewards and incentives.

‍Parents can set rewards and incentives to encourage positive behaviors and help their children build better habits around technology and beyond.

4. It gives parents coaching and inspiration.

‍Parenting in a digital world comes with challenges that screen-time limits alone can’t help with. Family Friendly AI gives parents personalized AI-insights and guidance to help them navigate what their children are doing online and decide what to do next.

5. It earns families' trust.

‍Technology for families should have a higher bar. The companies building it should stand behind it with an unconditional, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

It’s time for AI, crypto, and the technology shaping our children’s lives to meet the family-friendly standard.

Big Tobacco Had Its Reckoning. Now It’s Big Tech’s Turn.

Aug 12th, 2026
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The floodgates are open.

Thousands of lawsuits are moving forward. States are writing new rules for kids online. And lawmakers are beginning to tell AI companies what they can and cannot do when children use their products.

And you don't have to look far to see it happening...

The courts: 3,000+ lawsuits get the green light

On August 10, the Ninth Circuit allowed more than 3,000 lawsuits against Meta, Google/YouTube, TikTok and Snap to move forward.

The cases allege that the companies deliberately designed features of their platforms to be addictive, particularly for young users.

The tech companies had argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protected them from the claims. The court rejected their attempt to use Section 230 to stop the litigation at this stage, finding that it provides a defense rather than immunity from being sued.

At their core, these cases are allegations about the platforms themselves: how they were designed, how they kept people engaged, and what responsibility the companies bear for the consequences.

The companies will still have the opportunity to defend themselves against those allegations.

But with more than 3,000 cases now getting the chance to be heard, this is getting harder to argue away.

New Jersey: families get a way to enforce the rules

One day later, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill signed the New Jersey Kids Code Act into law.

The law establishes new design and privacy requirements for covered online services likely to be accessed by minors. Among other provisions, it requires high privacy settings by default, restricts certain push notifications, prohibits dark patterns for minors, limits how children's personal data can be used and retained, and places restrictions on targeted advertising.

But one provision in particular changes the accountability equation: a private right of action.

An individual under 18 who is injured by a violation can bring a claim under the law, with statutory damages of $5,000 per violation. Parents may also bring an action on a minor's behalf.

Which is legal language for something pretty simple: families don't have to wait around for a regulator to act. They can take companies to court themselves.

Colorado: AI safety starts becoming a legal requirement

Then there's Colorado.

Earlier this year, Governor Jared Polis signed Colorado HB 26-1263, establishing specific requirements for operators of conversational AI services.

And this one is worth paying attention to because the law doesn't simply tell AI companies to "keep kids safe." It starts defining what that actually means.

Operators must estimate users' ages. When dealing with minors, the law requires recurring disclosures that they are interacting with AI rather than a person and establishes protections around sexually explicit interactions.

It also addresses one of the most unsettling questions surrounding companion-style AI: emotional dependence.

The law requires safeguards designed to prevent conversational AI from producing statements that simulate emotional dependence. It also requires protocols for responding to suicidal ideation and self-harm, privacy and account-management tools for minors and parents or guardians, and reporting requirements intended to help regulators evaluate whether those safeguards are actually working.

The law takes effect January 1, 2027.

For companies building conversational AI, that's a meaningful shift. Child safety is moving beyond a set of voluntary guardrails companies write for themselves. In Colorado, some of those guardrails are becoming law.

It's no coincidence that this is all happening at once.

Big Tobacco didn't wake up one morning and discover the world had changed its mind. The reckoning came piece by piece, until lawsuits became regulation and an industry that had spent decades setting its own standards was finally forced to take responsibility for the harm its products caused.

We're watching that shift happen again.

For years, the responsibility for keeping kids safe online has fallen on parents.

Set the parental controls. Check the privacy settings. Watch the screen time. Know which apps they're using. Figure out who they're talking to. Keep up with every new platform, algorithm and now AI chatbot entering their lives.

All while the technology on the other side of the screen gets more sophisticated by the month.

Now courts and lawmakers are starting to ask the companies building that technology a much more uncomfortable question:

If children are using your products, what are you doing to keep them safe?

For families, that's the shift that matters most.

This isn't another round of false promises to "do better."

This is legislation. These are lawsuits. This is accountability beginning to have teeth.

Parents will always have the role of protecting their children online. We happen to believe they should have far more visibility and control over the technology entering their families' lives, not less.

But parents cannot be the entire safety system.

The law is making clear that the companies designing the products, writing the algorithms and building the AI our kids interact with have a responsibility, too.

And when they fail to meet it, they'll finally be held accountable.

ChatGPTs Births A Parenting Tool That Needs Some Image Repair

Aug 4th, 2026
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Sam Altman keeps pitching AI as a co-parent. The reason parents aren't buying isn't nostalgia, it's the lawsuits.

Last Friday, Sam Altman had an idea he was excited about. Hook your family calendar up to ChatGPT, tell it what your kids are into, and every morning on the drive to school it'll produce a little podcast: one kid's soccer game that afternoon, another kid's birthday coming up, maybe some news. He called it a "cool use case."

What should’ve felt really innovative, landed like the opening scene of a bleak dystopian movie. Two kids in the back, one parent up front, and a smooth synthetic voice narrating, to everyone present, the lives of everyone present. "Later today, Maya has soccer." Maya, who has soccer, looks out the window. Nobody says anything, because the podcast is saying it for them.

The internet population caught what we caught. The reply that stuck came from Alex Hirsch, creator of Disney’s Animated series, Gravity Falls. It was seven poignant words: "What if you just talked to your children?" That was the entire rebuttal, and it traveled a great deal further than the thing it was rebutting. Altman's post drew somewhere around 9,600 likes. Hirsch's reply cleared 120,000. On the CEO's own platform, the crowd took a vote, and the crowd chose the small talk.

Now, we want to be fair here, because the easy thing is to dunk and move on. But we’re parents here at Permission and anyone who has done the 7:40 a.m. drive on four hours of sleep, refereeing a backseat dispute about who touched whom first, knows the exact fantasy of a button that handles the morning. That instinct isn't a character flaw. It's a Tuesday.

But this wasn't a one-off. Altman has been quietly auditioning AI for the co-parent role for a while now. On The Tonight Show in December 2025 he said he couldn't imagine having to "raise a newborn without ChatGPT" then added that people had managed the trick for a few hundred thousand years without it. Also, last year, in a podcast hosted by Andrew Mayne, Altman admitted that people might form “problematic parasocial relationships” to a chatbot. (You know, the one-sided kind that we usually reserve for celebrities we've never met.) He sees the hazards clearly. He's pitching the product anyway.

When visibility turns into vulnerability.

The reason parents flinched at the idea of carpooling with a chatbot for school drop off isn't that they're allergic to convenience. It's that the company making the offer is, right now, being sued by multiple families who say its chatbot played a role in their loved ones' spiraling delusions and, in the worst cases, their deaths. OpenAI says it is continually improving how its models handle sensitive conversations, and that work genuinely matters. But you can see the problem. "Let me into your calendar, your commute, and your kids personal details" is a big ask from anyone. It is a much bigger ask from a company currently explaining itself in court.

Trust isn't a feature you ship in the next update. It's something people hand you slowly, and take back all at once.

Here's where we should admit an interest. We build Permission on a belief that sounds boring until you sit with it: your data belongs to you. With Permission your kids’ browsing history doesn’t get shipped out to the open internet. Not to a model, not to a growth chart, not to whoever posts the next cool use case. And the closer AI creeps toward our kids (and it is creeping, because kids are already asking it everything) the more one question starts to outrank all the others:

Where is the line between parenting and outsourcing parenting?

Because "parenting tool" is doing a lot of quiet work in that phrase. A tool is a hammer. It lives in a drawer, it does one honest thing, and it does not ask to read your child's messages or move into the family calendar. When a company calls its chatbot a "parenting tool," it's worth asking, gently, which word they mean. The tool part, or the parenting part.

We happen to think AI can be genuinely, unglamorously useful to families. Not by doing the talking for you, but by handing you the context you'd otherwise miss instead of a thousand panicked notifications, and then getting out of the way so you can make the call. That's a real distinction, and it deserves its own piece.

So take this as Part One: the news, the flinch, and the reason the flinch is earned. In Part Two, we'll make the harder and more hopeful argument that you can let AI help you parent without completely handing over your family secrets. There is a version of this where the grown-ups stay in charge. We think it's the only version worth building.

For now, the seven best words anyone has offered on the whole affair still belong to Hirsch. So we'll give him the last one, too.

What if you just talked to your children?

‍