Crypto Could Destabilize Nations, Undermine Dollar’s Reserve Currency Status, Hillary Clinton Says

Former U.S. Secretary of State and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton slammed cryptocurrencies on Friday, calling on nation-states to keep a tab on their rise.

“One more area that I hope nation-states start paying greater attention to is the rise of cryptocurrency 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, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger,” Clinton said during a panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore.

While crypto fanboys have long hailed bitcoin as a better alternative to the U.S. dollar, traditional market pundits suggest otherwise. “Bitcoin is unlikely to replace the dollar as a global reserve currency,” Marc Chandler, chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex and author of the book “Making Sense of the Dollar,” told CoinDesk last year. “Backing the dollar is the world’s biggest, deepest and the most transparent government bond market.”

Clinton’s comments come in the wake of controversial crypto tax reporting requirement that was part of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday. Per the bill, from 2023 brokers will need to disclose customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, capital gains, and losses to the Internal Revenue Service. Entities receiving crypto payments worth more than $10,000 will have to reveal the sender’s identity to the government.

Earlier this week, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a joint effort by democratic nations to ensure cryptocurrencies do not “end up in the wrong hands, which can spoil our youth.”