Jamie Elizabeth Smith, who worked with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Senator Rockefeller and Madeleine Albright, has joined BitFury to become its Global Chief of Communications.

To take the position in BitFury, Smith left what she describes in her post in Medium as a “fantastic job” at Edelman, “the greatest and largest Public Relations firm in the world.” The reason? “I believe in the Blockchain and the transformational power of this technology”, says Smith. This innovation, according to her, “can – and will – positively change the world.”

The better world is already being born, she states. People now are able to “send money as easily as we send emails”, e-commerce websites are not hacked (she cites BitFury as an example of security), criminal transactions “are logged in a permanent record,” no exorbitant fees to banks or credit card companies are needed, and property titles in developing countries are on their way to become reliable. “And that is just the beginning of the possibilities,” because blockchain now is similar to the Internet in 1994.

It seems interesting that in her post the new Global Chief of Communications of a bitcoin mining company mentions the word “bitcoin” just once, when giving definition to blockchain: “an unalterable public ledger where every single bitcoin transaction is recorded.” She considers the blockchain a “groundbreaking innovation that will open endless doors for millions of people around the world.” She details multiple uses for digital currency, but carefully avoids naming it again.

In the past Ms. Smith served as Deputy White House Press Secretary and Special Assistant to President Obama and held a vast array of positions doing public relations on behalf of a Senate committee and a number of officials within the Democratic Party.

In the bitcoin community reaction to the news was mixed. While most were happy about Ms Smith’s decision and her words, some Redditors were surprised about the fact that BitFury, a company “that interacts so little with the outside world,” needed a Global Chief of Communications. Others were not happy about a Washington insider taking an important role in the bitcoin ecosystem. According to Tom Mornini,

CoinFox has written extensively on high-ranking officials that chose to enter the world of cryptocurrency. Gene Sperling, an ex-economic advisor to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and  Anja Manuel, a former employee of the US Department of State, who took positions in Ripple Labs, as well as Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, John Reed, ex-CEO of Citibank, and Lawrence H. Summers, ex-Secretary of the Treasury, who joined the advisory board of Xapo. Blythe Masters, former head of commodities branch at JP Morgan, is now CEO of Digital Asset Holdings, a company specialising in distributed ledgers. Brian Forde, formerly a White House colleague of Ms. Smith, now runs Digital Currency Initiative in MIT Media Lab.

Alexey Tereshchenko