Hillary Clinton and Bankers Against Cryptocurrencies By James Reed
To see where things are going, it is always a good idea to look at what the likes of Obama and Clinton are up to, lower-level elites who give the game away because they love talking. Thus, Hillary Clinton late last year was at a panel at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, and apart from blasting Putin, raged against cryptocurrencies, which she saw as “destabilising” nations. By that she really meant, posing a threat to the mainstream financial system, which the existing elites control in their centralised fashion.
“Former secretary of state and failed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Thursday during a panel at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore that cryptocurrencies could “destabilize” nations.
Discussing Russian President Vladimir Putin, Clinton said, “He has a very large stable of hackers and those who deal in disinformation and cyber warfare both in and outside the government. He is engaged in a lot of asymmetric power moves. I think one of the areas nation-states have got to pay greater attention to the rise of asymmetric power centers.”
Hillary Clinton continued, “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, undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations, perhaps starting with small ones, but going much larger. So when we think about this new environment that we find ourselves in that we have been discussing, we can’t just think about nation-states. Putin is a great example of that with his oligarchic coterie he has utilized many non-state actors to personal as well as nationalistic goals, and I think that’s going to become a greater and greater threat.”
The mainstream financial elite attack upon cryptocurrencies has also moved along the lines that currencies like Bitcoin use too much energy in mining, and thus conflict with the sacred canons of climate change.
“Faced with a sharp rise in energy consumption, Swedish authorities are calling on the European Union to ban "energy intensive" crypto mining.
Erik Thedéen, director of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, and Björn Risinger, director of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, said cryptocurrency's rising energy usage is threatening Sweden's ability to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement.
Between April and August this year, the energy consumption of Bitcoin mining in the Nordic country rose "several hundred per cent," and now consumes the equivalent electricity of 200,000 households, Thedéen and Risinger said.
In an open letter, the directors of Sweden's top financial and environmental regulators called for an EU-wide ban on "proof of work" cryptocurrency mining, for Sweden to "halt the establishment" of new crypto mining operations and for companies that trade and invest in crypto assets to be prohibited from describing their business activities as environmentally sustainable.
Proof of work
The key issue driving the Swedish regulators' intervention is the "proof of work" system used to mint many cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ether, the world's two largest tokens.
Under the proof of work system, computers must solve mathematical puzzles in order to validate transactions that occur on a given network.
The process is designed to become more difficult as the number of blocks of validated transactions in the chain increases, meaning more computing power - and therefore energy - is required.
This leads to an arms race among miners, who compete to be the first to validate a new block and claim the prize of a new crypto coin: the more powerful your hardware, the more likely you are to get the coin.
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In recent months, the Nordic countries have seen a rise in crypto mining as producers attracted by lower energy prices and a relative abundance of renewable electricity flee China's crackdown on the industry.
The growth of crypto mining brings with it an opportunity cost, Thedéen and Risinger said, as Sweden's renewable energy is diverted away from industrial, transport and domestic uses, and into Bitcoin and other tokens.
"It is currently possible to drive a mid-size electric car 1.8 million kilometres using the same energy it takes to mine one single Bitcoin,” they said.
“This is the equivalent of forty-four laps around the globe. 900 bitcoins are mined every day. This is not a reasonable use of our renewable energy".
Not all cryptocurrencies operate from mining, based upon solving mathematical equations, so even if the climate change fanatics do move against coins like Bitcoin, other coins operating on a different system will flourish.
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