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The Netherlands must ban the mining, trading and holding of Bitcoin because it doesnât meet any of the three functions of money and is handy for criminals, one Dutch official argued.
While El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as legal tender, one Dutch official blasted the cryptocurrency, calling for an urgent blanket ban.
Pieter Hasekamp, director of the Dutch Bureau for Economic Analysis under the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, published an essay entitled âThe Netherlands must ban bitcoin.â
In line with the essayâs title, Hasekamp lists a wide list of reasons why the Dutch government must enforce an immediate total ban on mining, trading and holding Bitcoin (BTC). According to the official, this could cause the price to plummet because Bitcoin âhas no intrinsic value and is only valuable because others may accept it.â
The executive cited a common anti-crypto narrative, arguing that any cryptocurrency is unable to fulfill any of the three functions of money as a unit of account, means of payment and store of value. He also cited other common anti-Bitcoin arguments, such as security concerns, risks of fraud and scams, and argued that the crypto is useful tool for criminal actors.
Hasekamp said that the Netherlands has been lagging behind countries that have moved to âcurb the crypto hypeâ in recent years. âDutch regulators attempted to tighten up the supervision of trading platforms, but without much success. The Central Planning Bureau pointed out the risks of crypto trading in 2018, but concluded that stricter regulation was not yet necessary,â the official wrote.
Related:Â Dutch regulators unsure of number of crypto investors in Netherlands
In his essay, Hasekamp paid special attention to Greshamâs law, a monetary principle that states that overvalued currency, or âbad money,â tends to drive a legally undervalued currency, or âgood money,â out of circulation. Calling Bitcoin âbad money,â Hasekamp argued that Greshamâs law could work the opposite way with Bitcoin:
âCryptocurrencies demonstrate all the hallmarks of âbad moneyâ: unclear origin, uncertain valuation, shady trading practices. [...] Is Greshamâs law back? No, on the contrary. Cryptocurrencies are not used in regular payment transactions. [...] Bad money disappears from circulation because nobody wants to accept it anymore.â
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