Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has taken a swipe at cryptocurrencies, saying they have the power to weaken entire countries eventually.

Clinton said via video during a panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Friday in Singapore that governments around the world faced a range of new challenges, including disinformation and artificial intelligence.

“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 to trade with them has the potential for undermining currencies, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilising nations, perhaps starting with small ones but going much larger,” the former secretary of state said.

Clinton’s comments came while criticising Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing him of deploying “a very large stable of hackers and those who deal in disinformation and cyberwarfare”.

In 2017, Clinton blamed Russian interference along with questionable decisions by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for her loss the year before to Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential election. She highlighted Russia’s role in hacking into her campaign’s internal emails and later co-ordinating their release on WikiLeaks. 

“With his oligarchic coterie he has utilised many nonstate actors to personal as well as nationalistic goals, and I think that’s going to become a greater and greater threat,” she said at the forum in Singapore.

The New Economy Forum is organised by Bloomberg Media Group, a division of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.

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