Former democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke about Bitcoin and crypto’s ability to weaken governments during a video panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Friday.
Hillary warned, “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, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger.”
In describing this rather vague threat to nations and multinational corporations Hillary betrayed the fact that she doesn’t know the difference between Bitcoin and the separate asset class of crypto currencies. Many politicians don’t. The terms should not be used interchangeably.
Bitcoin assures anyone with internet access a decentralized, permissionless right to property that cannot be confiscated or censored by any government. No one on the Bitcoin network is forced to choose between updating their software or risk losing their wealth, it is backwards compatible. Bitcoin is a geographically agnostic personal sovereign wealth fund. The other thousands of cryptocurrencies are centralized and largely unregulated assets whose protocol can be changed at any time, thus, in crypto the threat of property confiscation persists. Bitcoin and crypto are completely different asset classes.
Therefore, when Clinton casually throws crypto in with her laundry list of threats to her political and economic worldview, she is categorically wrong. Crypto currencies cannot undermine fiat currencies or nation states outright, because what they offer is fundamentally the same as fiat, which is an asset that can and is debased by governance.
However, Bitcoin, and Bitcoin only, absolutely can, and is disrupting the dollar as a global reserve currency. Bitcoin is a very real threat to the theft of property perpetrated by governments on their people…
