Making Sense of Hillary Clinton’s Bitcoin Rejection

For Hillary Clinton’s campaign, accepting bitcoin was “too libertarian”.
That’s what we learned last week when it was revealed senior campaign aides for the US presidential candidate considered taking bitcoin campaign donations, but dismissed the idea. The email was part of the cache released by Wikileaks, but came to light via a social media thread dedicated to sharing noteworthy content from the many thousands of leaked messages.
For some market observers, the content of the conversation raised questions about the Clinton campaign and its knowledge of the technology.
That’s because, back in June, the Clinton campaign declared that its candidate supported public service blockchain applications. The claim implied some familiarity with the mechanics of bitcoin (it’s the first implementation of blockchain technology, after all), even though the policy seems more likely to have been written by a tech-savvy advisor.
So what is the Democratic hopeful’s position on bitcoin? The campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but other analysts shared ideas.

This post was published at Coin Desk on October 30, 2016.