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That's incorrect linkage. The beast was Nero who persecuted Christians, executed Peter and Paul. Many were the martyrs who died for not adoring the beast.

The key to interpreting the book of Apocalypse is Apocalypse 17:8-14

8 “The beast that you saw was, and is not, and is about to come up out of the abyss and [g]go to destruction. And those who dwell on the earth, whose name has not been written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, will wonder when they see the beast, that he was and is not and will come. 9 Here is the mind which has wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains on which the woman sits, 10 and they are seven kings; five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; and when he comes, he must remain a little while. 11 The beast which was and is not, is himself also an eighth and is one of the seven, and he goes to destruction. 12 The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but they receive authority as kings with the beast for one hour. 13 These have one [h]purpose, and they give their power and authority to the beast.

the coinage with images was part of this "mark of the beast" and remember that Emperor Caligula

note the 7 heads, the 7 Emperors, out of which 5 "have fallen": Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero

The seventh "is not yet come. But when he does, his reign will remain short" - that is Domitian, who ruled 2 years (the 6th and 7th heads were Vespasian and Titus respectively

Sorry Cronos.

Per Paul, Jesus destroys the beast, the man of sin, the son of perdition with His breath at His second coming.

That hasn’t happened yet.

Sorry, Petronius, you're conflating different things because you've already assumed them to be descriptions of the same event. That's you, not Paul, doing that. The letters to the Thessalonians were written at least 16 years before the earliest possible date of composition for Revelation (67 or 68AD) and Paul didn't refer to "the man of sin, the son of perdition" as "the beast." Furthermore, it doesn't at all follow that what Paul said cannot be true at the same time that "the beast" in Revelation (the first beast) was referring to the historical Nero. You're assuming it can't be true because of a prior eschatological belief. On the other hand, it was the first beast that had been wounded but it was the second beast that caused the mark of the number of its name to be put on people's hands or foreheads, so that complicates the picture for considering that the mark giver was referring to Nero, since it was the second, non-wounded beast, that did that. If the wounded beast was Nero who died by sword at his own hand and the restored beast (the first one, not the second) was the restoration of the power of Rome through a line of Caesars, then the "second beast" who was subsequent to the "first beast," identified as Nero, and who did the mark of the beast thing, couldn't be referring to Nero, because this would have been after Nero's death and the reestablishment of Rome after the chaos following Nero's death.

Furthermore, "the beast" is not the same being described by Paul as being destroyed by Christ's breath at his coming since Revelation described the beast and the false prophet as being captured alive and then thrown alive into the lake of fire, everyone else being killed "killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse." So, if "the man of sin" is destroyed by Christ's breath and that is referring to "the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse" and "the beast" is tossed alive into the lake of fire, then it would require that the "sword coming out of the mouth" and "the lake of fire" are one and the same if "the beast" is the same as "the man of sin."

Bottom line: there's a good reason why a lot of folks were suspicious of Revelation and why it was the last book to make it into the canon.