Cryptocurrency can destabilise nations: Hillary Clinton

File pic: Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at the 2017 Stephan Weiss Apple Awards on June 7, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images for Urban Zen Foundation)

Cryptocurrencies have the potential to weaken and debilitate entire nations in due course of time, said Hillary Clinton. The former Democratic Presidential candidate was addressing a panel at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum called for greater attention towards the emergence of this asset class, given that they could possibly undermine existing fiat currencies and the dollar's role of being the reserve currency.

Clinton mentioned, "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".

With governments across the globe facing a host of new challenges like disinformation, artificial intelligence, and more, the former Secretary of State highlighted how non-state actors could pursue this for their personal, malicious goals.

Clinton also criticised Russian President Vladimir Putin, who - she claimed - "had deployed a very large stable of hackers and those who dabble in disinformation and cyberwarfare".

On prior occasions as well, like in 2017, when she lost the presidency to Republican Donald Trump, Clinton had blamed Russian intervention and their role in hacking into her campaign's internal emails, and later, orchestrating their release on WikiLeaks. Alongside, she also brought to light the dubious decisions made by the FBI in this regard.