Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State, has called on the Biden administration to regulate the crypto market. She said that stronger regulations were needed for the crypto space in order to protect against technological manipulations by China, Russia and other countries. She appeared for an interview on MSNBC TV with news host Rachel Maddow and her comments regarding digital assets were part of a larger segment that was focused on the manipulation of social media networks by certain countries. Clinton said that her warning was applicable to ‘technology of all kinds’. She said that both state and non-state entities could use it for destabilizing countries.
She went on to add that it could also be used for destabilizing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. She stated that there was one thing on the horizon that people had begun to be attentive to and this called for regulation of the crypto market. Hillary Clinton said to think about the combination of social media platforms and then controlling certain crypto chains for amassing even larger amounts of money. She added that it wasn’t just countries like China, Russia and others that had to be considered, but they also had to think about non-state actors, who could be working with states, or their own destabilized countries for the purpose of destabilizing the dollar.
She was particularly focused on how social media platforms that have already been used for influencing elections via disinformation could actually be combined with the crypto market in such a manner that can be used by state actors as well as non-state ones for destabilizing entire countries. Even though she did not provide much detail, Clinton said that the potential ways this could be accomplished included manufacturing hype, manipulating markets, or even using social media troll farms for engineering a financial crash.
In recent years, countries have already used, or have publicly considered the use of cryptocurrency as a way of getting around the economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Most importantly, crypto has been used by North Korea for funding their nuclear weapons program. The country has also used privacy coins, along with other methods, for avoiding detection. Moreover, the Iranian government has also publicly shared their positive stance in regard to cryptocurrencies. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ commander, Saeed Mohammad, specifically called for Iran in early 2020 to use cryptocurrency as a way of getting around the sanctions imposed on the country by the US.
In recent weeks, Clinton has highlighted the different problems that cryptocurrency can cause when it comes to challenging the global dominance of the US dollar. On Friday, at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, she stated that even though cryptocurrencies were an interesting technology, it was important to note that they can have negative on the United States, as well as other countries. She said that it could start with small countries and then move onto larger ones. The event was being held in Singapore, where she shared her concerns about these digital currencies.
