BCGAME - Free 5BTC Daily Bonus!As the government of El Salvador adopts Bitcoin as its legal currency, a Dutch official has criticized the cryptocurrency, calling for an urgent general ban.
Pieter Hasekamp, director of the Netherlands Office for Economic Analysis at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, has published an essay titled “The Netherlands Should Ban Bitcoin.”
In keeping with the title of the essay, Hasekamp lists a broad list of reasons why the Dutch government should impose an immediate outright ban on Bitcoin (BTC) mining, trading and ownership. According to the official, this could cause the price to plummet because Bitcoin “has no intrinsic value and only has value because others can accept it.”
The executive cited a common anti-crypto narrative, arguing that any cryptocurrency is incapable of fulfilling any of money's three functions as a unit of account, a means of payment and a store of value. He also cited other common anti-Bitcoin arguments, such as security issues, risks of fraud and scams, and argued that encryption is a useful tool for criminal actors.
Hasekamp said the Netherlands has lagged behind countries that have moved to "contain the encryption hype" in recent years. “Dutch regulators tried to increase oversight of trading platforms, but without much success. The Central Planning Bureau pointed out the risks of the cryptography trade in 2018, but concluded that stricter regulation was not yet necessary,” the official wrote.
In his essay, Hasekamp paid special attention to Gresham's law, a monetary principle which states that overvalued currency, or "bad money", tends to take out of circulation a legally devalued currency, or "good money". Calling Bitcoin “bad money,” Hasekamp argued that Gresham's law could work the opposite way with Bitcoin:
“Cryptocurrencies demonstrate all the characteristics of 'bad money': unclear origin, uncertain valuation, questionable business practices. […] Is Gresham's Law Back? No, on the contrary. Cryptocurrencies are not used in regular payment transactions. […] Bad money disappears from circulation because no one wants to accept it anymore. ”
