- Brock Pierce, a self-made billionaire, is one of the world’s biggest proponents of cryptocurrencies.
- Pierce is a cheeky bitcoin bull, but he still says bitcoin “maxis” are making a mistake.
- He shared three of his favorite investments in addition to the world’s largest digital token.
Unlike most self-made entrepreneurs, Brock Pierce was famous before he was rich.
The 41-year-old cryptocurrency billionaire became widely known before he turned 13 thanks to his role in Disney’s “The Mighty Ducks,” but while that concert brought a handful of others in the movies, acting was not his calling. Pierce said goodbye to Hollywood in the late 1990s and began to get involved in
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video and digital currencies: more than 10 years before they became mainstream.
In the two decades since, Pierce has become one of the biggest names in crypto. After co-founding Blockchain Capital, a crypto-focused venture capital firm, and Tether, the largest stablecoin on the market, Pierce is now one of the most influential and vocal advocates of digital assets in the world.
Pierce has made educating world leaders about cryptocurrencies one of his top priorities. Last fall, he led a delegation of 37 crypto industry veterans who helped guide El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele as the country adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. It was an unprecedented victory, but it will soon be the first of many.
Leaders of “more than 30 governments” have spoken with Pierce about following in El Salvador’s footsteps, he told Insider in a recent interview. And after working to turn politicians into crypto, Pierce is preparing for a transition of his own. He confirmed that he plans to take the fight for crypto-friendly regulation into his own hands by running for a U.S. Senate seat in 2022.
“I’m clearly taking a very serious look at how the United States gets involved, and it starts with having people who really understand what’s going on taking a seat at the table and those conversations that go on,” Pierce said. “I spend a lot of time in Washington, DC, talking to our elected officials, talking to the legislature at the state and federal level, and trying to brief people to give them the information they need so they can make wise and informed decisions regarding our future. collective “.
For Pierce, cryptocurrencies are more than a promising technology or a way to store and build wealth. He sees it as a way to bring “economic opportunity to all” by banking the unbanked, restoring accountability in a financial system marked by “shadow” and “opacity,” and “democratizing and decentralizing” the economy to that works for everyone, not just the rich.
Idealistic? Maybe. Imminent? Possibly depending on how quickly governments figure out how to regulate it. Inevitable? Pierce has no doubts.
“This is a very basic technology at its core,” Pierce said. “The implications of this technology, like the Internet, are substantial and wide, but in essence, it is just a database. And with this distributed database, we can do all kinds of things that are likely to affect everything.”
“Maxis” Get It Wrong: Three Bitcoin Alternatives to Consider
Despite Pierce’s unshakable conviction in bitcoin, he is not a bitcoin maximalist. The so-called “maxis” believe that all blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, in addition to the world’s largest token, are inferior, a narrow line of thinking that, in Pierce’s view, hurts progress.
“I try to always keep an open mind,” Pierce said. “I don’t want to become so rigid in my views as to close the doors to things that could be successful. I know I don’t have all the answers and I don’t want to shut down on potential innovation. That is why I have always been agnostic in the sense that If someone succeeds in making the world a better place, we all win. So why would I want to close the door on a technology that could be successful? “
That begs the question: if the head of the Bitcoin Foundation has branched out and not only has so-called digital gold, how can investors do the same?
Pierce told Insider about three alternatives to bitcoin that he owns and likes, although these ideas are not investment recommendations. Below are Pierce’s comments on each, along with the token or stock’s symbol or ticker, as well as a graph of how each asset has performed over the past year.