Last year I taught the environmental module on Cambridge's digital assets course for regulators. Across the two cohorts, the room held 348 financial-sector officials, from 24 central banks and 43 countries. I went in to give the people who write the rules a different way to look at the question. Energy use is not environmental harm. I made that point the way I assess any technology as a climate-tech investor: carbon debt, carbon displacement, carbon payback. Bitcoin already runs on 52.4% sustainable energy, the highest of any global industry, per Cambridge. Coming from an investor rather than a Bitcoiner changes how it lands. It lets a regulator lower the environmental risk they assign to proof-of-work, without feeling they have gone soft on digital assets. Risk perception is the input to restrictive policy. Shifting it is the highest-leverage thing you can do in that room. It also pre-empts the standard objections. The per-transaction energy claim, the country comparison, the water and e-waste lines - all answered with data, in advance. The estimates that started the energy panic were debunked in four peer-reviewed studies. A regulator who has already heard that won't be swayed by those lines the next time someone repeats them. The timing did some of the work. Grid strain from AI data centres is the live issue on their desks. Bitcoin mining is the flexible counterpoint to inflexible AI base load. That moves it from problem to part of the solution at the moment they are grappling with it. What other regulators are already doing moves a regulator more than the argument does. And the data points one way. Since 2020, 47 countries have given mining more access and only nine still ban it. The biggest way nation states take Bitcoin exposure now is to mine it themselves. Once a regulator sees other countries doing this and benefiting, staying out looks riskier than stepping in. I'm not suggesting this equates to "proven policy change", and the audience for this education is self-selected. But Cambridge knew the content in advance, there was no pushback (because it was all backed by data, so on-brand for them), it was the highest-rated session, and I was invited back. For a neutral academic programme briefing regulators, that is the signal the argument landed. Those 348 came from the institutions that write the rules, many of them in senior, cautious roles. Each one takes what they learned back into their institution, and into the policy it shapes.