Regulate crypto to stop manipulation by Russia and China, Hillary Clinton says

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insists that cryptocurrency markets need stricter regulations to protect against technological manipulation from nations like Russia and China.

Clinton’s comments on digital currencies were an extract from a Nov. 24 interview with MSNBC TV news host Rachel Maddow, where they discussed the manipulation of social media platforms by certain nations.

Her warning was aimed at all kinds of tech innovations, which she said states and non-state entities could take advantage of to destabilize countries and the dollar as the reserve currency of the world. She stated:

There’s one other thing that’s on the horizon which people are only beginning to pay attention to, and that’s the need to regulate the cryptocurrency market. […] Imagine the combination of social media, the amassing of even larger sums of money through the control of certain cryptocurrency chains, […] We’re looking at not only states such as China, Russia, or others manipulating technology of all kinds to their advantage.

She laid emphasis on how social media platforms, which have been used to influence elections through disinformation, could be combined with the cryptocurrency markets to help state and non-state actors destabilize other countries.

Although Clinton didn’t mention any pattern with which these manipulations can occur, some potential use cases could be via manipulating markets, manufacturing hype, or even engineering a financial crash through social media troll farms.

Several nations have recently resorted to using or at least considered using cryptocurrency to bypass economic sanctions from the United States. North Korea, in particular, has used cryptocurrency to fund its nuclear weapons program. The country used privacy coins and various other methods to avoid detection.

Similarly, the Iranian government has also openly spoken in favor of cryptocurrency. The commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Saeed Muhammad, called specifically for Iran to use cryptocurrency to evade sanctions in early 2020.

Recently, Clinton came out to speak against the problems that cryptocurrency can cause for the US dollar's global dominance. She opined at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Nov. 19 that while cryptocurrencies are an “interesting” technology, they can also have negative effects on the United States and other countries, “perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger.”