Supporters of Bitcoin should be in favor of making it illegal in as many jurisdictions as possible. It's the only way to be sure it's as resistant to government power as it claims to be.
There's a meme in the Bitcoin community that mocks how some Bitcoin believers argue almost every event, no matter how bad it seems on the surface, is actually good for Bitcoin.
I understand what you're saying, but I find it hard to believe making Bitcoin illegal worldwide would be good for those who invest or simply believe in the future of Bitcoin.
Yea its really great to be prosecuted for no reason except the whims of the powerful, we should really all be in favor of making everything illegal by default.
This is the 'Centraal Plan Bureau'. If you open up the front door, you're met with a cloud of dust. The parkinglot is filled with oldtimers and the interior is very 'that 70's show'.
Part of his (reported) reasoning is really strange: because Bitcoin is doomed to crash, we have to take action, so the Netherlands should ban it. Causing it to crash earlier rather than later.
He also says that he isn't afraid that banning Bitcoin will fail, because a ban would lead to a crash.
The official narrative in the UK is "don't invest your money in cryptos, you are going to lose it all". However, if you happen to have cryptos you must declare them!
I wonder if the dutch government bans Bitcoin, that means that there is no need to declare anything. After all, it doesn't fulfill any function as money, means of payment or store of value.
This is a common political technique which is a variant of "floating a trial balloon": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon You put an idea out there in a way that can later be very cheaply walked back (because it wasn't an "official" idea), and gauge the reaction by the various interesting people to see how you want to proceed going forward.
Bear in mind the various "interesting people" may not include "the general public", despite this being in a general public newsfeed. Or, as I expect is probably this case, they may be interested in "the general public's" reaction but it may be a secondary goal vs. simply using the news media to gauge the response from the rest of the financial industry insiders.
This directory is likely to get various calls from various important people making various points pro or con now. Sometime in the next couple of weeks there will probably be some other release from this organization couched in diplo-speak. That is, if they say something like "decided not to pursue this at this time" it's quite possibly because their inbox was a sea of flame from the important people, whereas "are continuing to consider the matter" means they may have gotten conflicting, neutral, or tepid responses, and "developing a plan to pursue this matter going forward" means they may have gotten uniformly positive responses behind the scenes and a strong order from the Powers that Be to go ahead and be the ones who pursue this and take the heat for doing it. But in diplo-speak you almost never make strong commitments, you just barely deviate from "neutral" and expect people in the know to pick up what you're laying down.
I’m curious how the energy use of just a top 5 retail bank compares to Bitcoin.
Chase [0], for instance, has over 5,000 retail locations and 16,000 ATMs. And the servers, and call centers/corporate offices to support 200,000 employees. And the cars they drive back and forth to those offices, and the construction of new ones, and flights (some private), etc etc.
How much energy does that use—let alone the physical resources and their attendant carbon and energy use?
Then you have another 4,500 branches from Bank of America, 7200 for Wells, etc. And that’s just the US.
Not equivocating, nor arguing that Bitcoin could replace all their functions, but I think there might be more nuance to the energy argument, especially when at least other crypto currencies have an off ramp with their energy use via proof of stake.
It’s not even close. Banks provide so many services. your bank could be using a cryptocurrency as their backend, and you wouldn’t even know. the technology has almost zero impact to the user experience or efficiency. sorry
Ban exchanges from operating in Netherlands. Ban merchants in the Netherlands from accepting cryptocurrencies. Ban the exchange of cryptocurrencies by the public. Monitor the cryptocurrencies networks and have ISPs block access to all IPs running cryptocurrency nodes. Ban cryptocurrency mining. Ban services that offer online wallets. Block links to cryptocurrency software.
The entertainment industry has been unlucky that it hasn't managed to make the use of torrent illegal. They have to monitor the trackers and figure out who is sharing their copyrighted works and then send threatening emails and hope someone will comply. Instead since they would be banning cryptocurrencies completely they would be able to straight up block connections to cryptocurrency nodes.
You could still use a vpn to use cryptocurrencies, but still buying cryptocurrencies with money would be difficult enough to dissuade most people from doing so.
You don’t necessarily ban it as such, but with how accurate the European tax-agencies have been with collecting on the crypto-currency people trade, it doesn’t seem hard for them to track the trade.
Then it’s simply a question of confiscating whatever you turn your Bitcoin into. It’s usually how they deal with criminal gangs as well. “Can’t prove how you managed to buy a million dollar mansion while being unemployed?”, it is now the governments property… The primary reason it doesn’t really work on crime in general is because most of the money doesn’t stay where the drugs are sold, but most Bitcoin speculators/investors aren’t setup to live outside “the law”.
In Holland it could be as easy as simply having the banks confiscate any money that arrive from exchanges and blocking any transfers in the other direction. It wouldn’t exactly end Bitcoin as you point out, but it would make them rather worthless to most people.
> How do you effectively ban circulation of certain types of information?
This is an important question for our right to privacy too. Lets say that we succeed in replacing law with code, which we are doing but not very successfully. We can not rely on hardware like DRM does. We need to integrate a censor into the network.
Something that might work is a system like Ethereum's distributed virtual machine, and a much more involved version of smart contracts. Then you could fingerprint your private data, upload your fingerprint to each smart contract platform, and financial penalties are applied to those who transfer your data on the network without your permission.
I think we can replace most of government functions and services with a selection of apps that you subscribe to / tax you. I recently started working in earnest on the idea after being inspired by Project Cybersyn's planned economy.
You can make the cybernetic system democratic by treating likes/dislikes as votes; data to feed a recommender algorithm with. If the algo is expensive like NNMF you can use that as proof of work with real value. With enough data, the algo becomes a personal agent which can predict how the digital citizen will vote, and possibly able to do work with real value. It could perhaps negotiate a smart contract for you without interactivity.
One could impose a 100% tax/penalty on converting to fiat currency. I suppose that would get most 'investors' nervous enough to get out while they are stilled allowed to.
If Bitcoin was banned, then Dutch citizens could just as easily trade wrapped Bitcoin on the Ethereum, BSC or Solana networks. I don't really see how this works unless you literally ban all distributed consensus protocols.
And even so, how are you suppose to ban people from "holding" crypto. Transacting I can understand. But holding simply involves storing or remembering a private key. Are you going to ban people if you find a decade old USB stick with a cold wallet? Will you interrogate people, Clockwork Orange style, to make sure they forget their brain wallet phrase? If somebody was using the same public/private key for their other data will you force them to delete their entire crypto identity?
So does the Euro, which is used in his country, and so was the Dutch Guild, the one that came before. So does any other currency in use in the world.
> Fiat money does not have intrinsic value and does not have use value. It has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.
I want to see blockchain gone but most legislators don't understand it, they think it should be gone but they are not sure why so they end up with nonsense like this.
Yeah, boring argument. Fiat currency depends on acceptance.
Cryptocurrency does too but the problem is that the size of the economy that accepts Bitcoin as payment is absolutely tiny. You have to exchange your Bitcoin to fiat first before you can buy anything, which means Bitcoin will just end up driving more USD acceptance.
The USD is the official currency of the US of A, and all transactions and specially taxes are expressed in the official currency. This its value is automatically tied to the nation's total economic output.
Nobody, not even Biden has the political goodwill to make Bitcoin illegal and enrage so many constituents (aka lost votes)
The only ones who maybe can do it are Xi and Putin, and the latter seems more pro than against because everything which goes against the dollar is Putin's friend.
Xi is also on and off again with Bitcoin but every day which goes by in which he is not decisive is a day in favor of Bitcoin.
You are left with the Warren, Sanders, Corbyn types as well as this Dutch guy who have only one style of messaging: modern day Robinhoods (or Pocahontas) trying to take money away from people who work and make sacrifices to get ahead in life and redistribute it to themselves
Interesting how this narrative is forming. Politicians and bureaucrats around the globe are saying the same things in unison.
BTC is framed as destructive or dangerous and CBDC is their solution.
The same conclusion was arrived at in a recent Senate hearing chaired by Elizabeth Warren. Three out of four of her panelists had connections to the World Economic Forum. The fourth had connections to the US central bank.
There is nothing conspiratorial or notable that most of the people in the financial industry...work in the financial industry. Are experienced in the financial industry.
It never ceases to amuse how one group of people can see the worlds politicians, policy experts, and activists start to converge on an idea, and rather than assuming that the idea they are converging around is sound, they instead assume its due to a secretive cabal looking to further oppress the common man.
Assume for a moment that BTC actually was destructive and dangerous. What would you expect the response to be from these people?
It will never be used as a general currency by the man on the street.
For example in the UK we have Direct Debits which are backed by the DD Guarantee. If a DD is wrong or fraudulent the bank must refund you without question and they initiate a DDIC (indemnity claim) against the creditor bank. This could not happen with Bitcoin.
Same for problems such as push-payment fraud - they are rolling out confirmation of payee to try to tackle this. How could Bitcoin be a viable payment method in it's current form when addresses are anonymous (in the context of PPF)?
That bit at the end about Gresham's law made me cringe. This guy doesn't have any business talking about money publicly unless it's asking questions and taking notes.
Imagine you live in an economically unstable country and have $1000 that you want to preserve. You don't want to put it in your counties currency because of the inclination for the govt to do what venezuela did. US dollars have historically been the best option, but with the trajectory the US dollar is on, that might scare you due to inflation. Perhaps gold is an option, but how do you safely buy it and what are you going to do with gold coins? They can be stolen so easily. So this is the long-term allure of bitcoin. Put your money on the blockchain and all you have to do is remember a pass phrase to retrieve it. It doesn't suffer from inflation or govt debasing because it isn't controlled by a govt. It could be the best place to store money in terms and maintain constant buying power.
At least that is the idea, but in reality, it is a long way from that view. The issue is that people don't really buy into a consistent vision on what Bitcoin is and are still trying to figure out how much they value it and do price discovery. Let alone how it should be legislated. That being said, I believe the storage of value is a real problem and Bitcoin, or something like it, could be a valuable financial tool in a decade or so, once the dust has settled.
It reminds be a bit of the Internet back in the early 90s. All kinds of discussions and speculation, most of which ended up being very wrong, but the core technology ended up being dominant.
[+] [-] BreathHiker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaaskjdfh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kypro|4 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q="this+is+good+for+bitcoin"
I understand what you're saying, but I find it hard to believe making Bitcoin illegal worldwide would be good for those who invest or simply believe in the future of Bitcoin.
[+] [-] nathias|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mumblemumble|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pharmakom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shadonototro|4 years ago|reply
all about profits, nobody care about solving problems, they just want the price to grow to make profit from their investment
[+] [-] kokx|4 years ago|reply
He also says that he isn't afraid that banning Bitcoin will fail, because a ban would lead to a crash.
[+] [-] kyranjamie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torcete|4 years ago|reply
I wonder if the dutch government bans Bitcoin, that means that there is no need to declare anything. After all, it doesn't fulfill any function as money, means of payment or store of value.
[+] [-] jbverschoor|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
Bear in mind the various "interesting people" may not include "the general public", despite this being in a general public newsfeed. Or, as I expect is probably this case, they may be interested in "the general public's" reaction but it may be a secondary goal vs. simply using the news media to gauge the response from the rest of the financial industry insiders.
This directory is likely to get various calls from various important people making various points pro or con now. Sometime in the next couple of weeks there will probably be some other release from this organization couched in diplo-speak. That is, if they say something like "decided not to pursue this at this time" it's quite possibly because their inbox was a sea of flame from the important people, whereas "are continuing to consider the matter" means they may have gotten conflicting, neutral, or tepid responses, and "developing a plan to pursue this matter going forward" means they may have gotten uniformly positive responses behind the scenes and a strong order from the Powers that Be to go ahead and be the ones who pursue this and take the heat for doing it. But in diplo-speak you almost never make strong commitments, you just barely deviate from "neutral" and expect people in the know to pick up what you're laying down.
[+] [-] adwi|4 years ago|reply
I’m curious how the energy use of just a top 5 retail bank compares to Bitcoin.
Chase [0], for instance, has over 5,000 retail locations and 16,000 ATMs. And the servers, and call centers/corporate offices to support 200,000 employees. And the cars they drive back and forth to those offices, and the construction of new ones, and flights (some private), etc etc.
How much energy does that use—let alone the physical resources and their attendant carbon and energy use?
Then you have another 4,500 branches from Bank of America, 7200 for Wells, etc. And that’s just the US.
Not equivocating, nor arguing that Bitcoin could replace all their functions, but I think there might be more nuance to the energy argument, especially when at least other crypto currencies have an off ramp with their energy use via proof of stake.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_Bank
[+] [-] tehsauce|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tade0|4 years ago|reply
How do you effectively ban circulation of certain types of information?
The entertainment industry didn't manage to achieve this over the last 20 years.
[+] [-] throwawayffffas|4 years ago|reply
The entertainment industry has been unlucky that it hasn't managed to make the use of torrent illegal. They have to monitor the trackers and figure out who is sharing their copyrighted works and then send threatening emails and hope someone will comply. Instead since they would be banning cryptocurrencies completely they would be able to straight up block connections to cryptocurrency nodes.
You could still use a vpn to use cryptocurrencies, but still buying cryptocurrencies with money would be difficult enough to dissuade most people from doing so.
[+] [-] moksly|4 years ago|reply
Then it’s simply a question of confiscating whatever you turn your Bitcoin into. It’s usually how they deal with criminal gangs as well. “Can’t prove how you managed to buy a million dollar mansion while being unemployed?”, it is now the governments property… The primary reason it doesn’t really work on crime in general is because most of the money doesn’t stay where the drugs are sold, but most Bitcoin speculators/investors aren’t setup to live outside “the law”.
In Holland it could be as easy as simply having the banks confiscate any money that arrive from exchanges and blocking any transfers in the other direction. It wouldn’t exactly end Bitcoin as you point out, but it would make them rather worthless to most people.
[+] [-] ganzuul|4 years ago|reply
This is an important question for our right to privacy too. Lets say that we succeed in replacing law with code, which we are doing but not very successfully. We can not rely on hardware like DRM does. We need to integrate a censor into the network.
Something that might work is a system like Ethereum's distributed virtual machine, and a much more involved version of smart contracts. Then you could fingerprint your private data, upload your fingerprint to each smart contract platform, and financial penalties are applied to those who transfer your data on the network without your permission.
I think we can replace most of government functions and services with a selection of apps that you subscribe to / tax you. I recently started working in earnest on the idea after being inspired by Project Cybersyn's planned economy.
You can make the cybernetic system democratic by treating likes/dislikes as votes; data to feed a recommender algorithm with. If the algo is expensive like NNMF you can use that as proof of work with real value. With enough data, the algo becomes a personal agent which can predict how the digital citizen will vote, and possibly able to do work with real value. It could perhaps negotiate a smart contract for you without interactivity.
[+] [-] wyldfire|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanviegen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcolkitt|4 years ago|reply
And even so, how are you suppose to ban people from "holding" crypto. Transacting I can understand. But holding simply involves storing or remembering a private key. Are you going to ban people if you find a decade old USB stick with a cold wallet? Will you interrogate people, Clockwork Orange style, to make sure they forget their brain wallet phrase? If somebody was using the same public/private key for their other data will you force them to delete their entire crypto identity?
[+] [-] Encybe|4 years ago|reply
So does USD
[+] [-] cassianoleal|4 years ago|reply
> Fiat money does not have intrinsic value and does not have use value. It has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
[+] [-] jdmoreira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Darmody|4 years ago|reply
I want to see blockchain gone but most legislators don't understand it, they think it should be gone but they are not sure why so they end up with nonsense like this.
[+] [-] acheron|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
Cryptocurrency does too but the problem is that the size of the economy that accepts Bitcoin as payment is absolutely tiny. You have to exchange your Bitcoin to fiat first before you can buy anything, which means Bitcoin will just end up driving more USD acceptance.
[+] [-] anonuser123456|4 years ago|reply
Sounds pretty valuable to me.
[+] [-] tome|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] redis_mlc|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chaganated|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rualca|4 years ago|reply
The USD is the official currency of the US of A, and all transactions and specially taxes are expressed in the official currency. This its value is automatically tied to the nation's total economic output.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] detaro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Growling_owl|4 years ago|reply
The only ones who maybe can do it are Xi and Putin, and the latter seems more pro than against because everything which goes against the dollar is Putin's friend.
Xi is also on and off again with Bitcoin but every day which goes by in which he is not decisive is a day in favor of Bitcoin.
You are left with the Warren, Sanders, Corbyn types as well as this Dutch guy who have only one style of messaging: modern day Robinhoods (or Pocahontas) trying to take money away from people who work and make sacrifices to get ahead in life and redistribute it to themselves
[+] [-] aww_dang|4 years ago|reply
BTC is framed as destructive or dangerous and CBDC is their solution.
The same conclusion was arrived at in a recent Senate hearing chaired by Elizabeth Warren. Three out of four of her panelists had connections to the World Economic Forum. The fourth had connections to the US central bank.
https://www.banking.senate.gov/hearings/building-a-stronger-...
https://www.weforum.org/people/neha-narula
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/darrell-duffie
https://digitaldollarproject.org/
[+] [-] defaultname|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bart_spoon|4 years ago|reply
Assume for a moment that BTC actually was destructive and dangerous. What would you expect the response to be from these people?
[+] [-] rualca|4 years ago|reply
It's hard to refute their point when we've just saw bitcoin tanking and seeing its value drop to half in a few days.
[+] [-] dadoge|4 years ago|reply
Can’t make this up
[+] [-] fnord123|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dd36|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dadoge|4 years ago|reply
How can they say that with a straight face knowing what’s going on in El Salvador
[+] [-] danielmg|4 years ago|reply
For example in the UK we have Direct Debits which are backed by the DD Guarantee. If a DD is wrong or fraudulent the bank must refund you without question and they initiate a DDIC (indemnity claim) against the creditor bank. This could not happen with Bitcoin.
Same for problems such as push-payment fraud - they are rolling out confirmation of payee to try to tackle this. How could Bitcoin be a viable payment method in it's current form when addresses are anonymous (in the context of PPF)?
[+] [-] rualca|4 years ago|reply
It would make sense to point to Venezuela or Iran, but those examples don't get much attention for some reason.
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
That bit at the end about Gresham's law made me cringe. This guy doesn't have any business talking about money publicly unless it's asking questions and taking notes.
[+] [-] throwaway9870|4 years ago|reply
At least that is the idea, but in reality, it is a long way from that view. The issue is that people don't really buy into a consistent vision on what Bitcoin is and are still trying to figure out how much they value it and do price discovery. Let alone how it should be legislated. That being said, I believe the storage of value is a real problem and Bitcoin, or something like it, could be a valuable financial tool in a decade or so, once the dust has settled.
It reminds be a bit of the Internet back in the early 90s. All kinds of discussions and speculation, most of which ended up being very wrong, but the core technology ended up being dominant.