Hillary Clinton Unleashes on Cryptocurrencies: They’re ‘Undermining’ the Dollar, ‘Destabilizing Nations’
Hillary Clinton on Friday unleashed a verbal assault on cryptocurrencies, lamenting their “somewhat exotic” mining process and saying it threatened to “destabilize” nations.
“One more area that I hope nation states start paying greater attention to is the rise of cryptocurrency,” the former secretary of state said during a panel of at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. “Because what looks like a very interesting and somewhat exotic effort to literally mine new coins in order to trade with them has the potential for undermining currencies, undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones, but going much larger.”
Clinton, who served as the Democratic Party’s unsuccessful nominee for president in 2016, did not specify whether she was referring to proof-of-work mining or more recent incarnations, which include proof-of-stake, proof-of-space, and proof-of-coverage. She was presumably referring to the first version, which is the most energy-intensive option, and the one used by bitcoin. The alternatives are capable of consuming as little as 1 percent of the same energy, though some progressives have maintained a laser focus on the energy required by proof-of-work.
Just one small edit Hillary… pic.twitter.com/kPzDdXu2nt
— Peter McLasso (@PeterMcCormack) November 19, 2021
Clinton is the second Democrat in as many days to fret over cryptocurrency. President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead banking regulation, Saule Omarova, told the Senate on Thursday that she was worried “private innovation” in the sector could “undermine a lot of important public policies.”
Watch above via Bloomberg.
