Swedish Parliamentary Candidate to Raise Bitcoin-Only Campaign Funds

As of 10th July his campaign accepts donations exclusively in bitcoin.

"Bitcoin - and other digital currencies - is a fantastic innovation. By accepting only bitcoin in my campaign I want to spread the knowledge and also hope some new people will try it."

"Even if I don't get that many donations I will stick with bitcoin through this campaign, and I hope and I think that the bitcoin community will help me out. Even if the donations don't stack up that high I will be able to run my campaign."

For him it's as much a bitcoin advocacy effort as it is campaign financing.

While Sundin follows other political candidates in accepting bitcoin for campaign contributions, he won't accept dollars, euros or even Swedish kronas.

Bitcoin is acceptable in Swedish political campaign fundraising to the point of 4.7 BTC, Sundin said.

"But my privacy concern with bitcoin is that all transactions are public. That is of course an important part of bitcoin, but governments might be able to use this as part of their surveillance. Therefore I don't think bitcoin will be very popular for criminal activity and terrorism."

In the Scandinavian region alone, the first bitcoin ATM in Europe came out of Finland; auroracoin emerged out of Iceland as a national cryptocurrency distributed to the entire population; Safello, who by now have established themselves as the leading European bitcoin exchange, are based in Sweden.

The bitcoin debate isn't a mainstream discussion in Sweden, he explained; few lawmakers have even thought about bitcoin.

"Bitcoin is a real chance for the emerging economies to catch up, but at the same time we see that the investment in bitcoin companies is in the US. We [Sweden] have a well-built startup infrastructure, but we also have strong interest that will put pressure on lawmakers to slow down bitcoin. That might not be the case in all the emerging economies."