Patrick Murck, a founding member and the general counsel of the Bitcoin Foundation, works internationally on bitcoin’s public policy to expand its use and presence.

When PayPal announced in late 2014 that it would start accepting bitcoins, or BTC, as a form of currency, the news sparked yet another wave of speculation about the digital currency’s future. Phillip Inman, the Guardian’s economics correspondent, reported the Bank of England’s fear that bitcoin threatens the UK’s financial stability while Marc Andreessen, an entrepreneur and software engineer, wrote in the New York Times that bitcoin will allow us to reinvent how the financial system can and should work alongside the Internet.

While misconceptions about bitcoin abound, the Bitcoin Foundation, a trade association headquartered in Washington, DC, works to correct those assumptions and standardize and promote the currency’s use. Patrick Murck, a founding member and the group’s general counsel, works internationally on bitcoin’s public policy to expand its use and presence. “No one is asking, ‘Why would someone build this?’” Murck says. “Illicit activity and misuse of the system is what caught the media’s attention. We’re creating a public policy framework that can grow and change the public’s perception so bitcoin becomes something they can believe in.”

Founded in July 2012, the Bitcoin Foundation tackled the currency’s most visible problems with a controversial initial strategy. Some have described bitcoin as libertarian in its desire to avoid taxation, state regulation, and third party oversight, but starting in 2012, Murck and others at the foundation went directly to law enforcement officers to discuss the inaccurate perceptions about bitcoin’s uses and benefits.
READ MORE