The Central Planning Bureau takes issue with decentralization? I am shocked!
CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
61–70 of 210 posts
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say maybe we should in general ban things that are a certain amount less energy efficient (say, 5x more wasteful) than the best technology we've achieved for a similar purpose so far. And progressively tax anything that's moderately more wasteful (say, 2x-5x). It's bad enough that we have cars on roads that are twice as wasteful as they could be, let alone a transaction processing…
I'm not saying you're wrong but of course it's not that easy. Using your argument we could ban all cars because there are bicycles and they are vastly more efficient. Or we ban heating in houses because you can just wear warmer clothes instead.
No, you're just turning what I said into a strawman. A bike is far more limited in what it can achieve than a car. And home heating heats a lot more than just the people inside.
Note that I didn't claim it's easy to come up with a good way to do this. You might have to settle for some partial progress. But that doesn't mean I'm putting up a strawman either.
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#63The reason we have to go to the trouble of making cryptocurrencies is that busybodies like this guy are endlessly trying to reduce our freedom. They're not trying to look out for people; they're trying to protect their ability to print money and steal. In crypto parlance, they want to remain the VIPs that have centralized special privileged access to create tokens, and force usage thereof. But now we have the technol…
I don’t think that the Netherlands is the country where wealth is routinely stolen from common folk.
Netherlands is one of the largest channels between the EU and offshore tax havens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#64The HN headline is a bit alarmist. The headline I see is "CPB director: The Netherlands must ban bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies". This is the opinion of the CPB director in a letter, so it's not binding in any way. > A cryptocurrency crash is inevitable, he says. That is why the Netherlands must intervene. Should the government be banning any speculative investment that appears to be in a bubble?
Well, pyramid games are routinely banned. There are good arguments to be made that Bitcoin is a pyramid game much more than a "asset class in a bubble".
I'm only talking about Pieter Hasekamp's arguments, which don't seem to be good ones.
If he wants to argue that Bitcoin is a pyramid game, that's a different argument, but I can't see many people taking him seriously.
Pieter's arguments are along the lines of a "Think of the Children"[1] style argument, or an appeal to consequences[2].
"We must ban cryptocurrency because if we don't, people might lose their money!"
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#65The reason we have to go to the trouble of making cryptocurrencies is that busybodies like this guy are endlessly trying to reduce our freedom. They're not trying to look out for people; they're trying to protect their ability to print money and steal. In crypto parlance, they want to remain the VIPs that have centralized special privileged access to create tokens, and force usage thereof. But now we have the technol…
I don’t think that the Netherlands is the country where wealth is routinely stolen from common folk.
Depends how you obtained that wealth.
The people love personal success stories, but dislike people who show off too much or exploited certain situations.
There is this guy that made quite some money on covid masks. A lot of people were not too happy he made a profit on that.
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#66Why should others decide if I can run useless hashing functions on my computer? Price the electricity accordingly, and make PoW impossible. Cryptocurrency is no the enabler of ransomware. Ransomware was prevalent before cryptocurrencies. The real enablers of ransomware are the countries that shelter the R10 groups, raking in millions. There's a reason some ransomware doesn't run when your system has a Russian languag…
> Why should others decide if I can run useless hashing functions on my computer? Price the electricity accordingly, and make PoW impossible.
Cultural model. I don't feel like increasing the electricity price for everyone is a better solution.
> Cryptocurrency is no the enabler of ransomware. Ransomware was prevalent before cryptocurrencies. The real enablers of ransomware are the countries that shelter the R10 groups, raking in millions.
Cryptocurrency are a good catalyst. The first does not exclude the last. The "real enabler" is that fast growing systems are juicy and fragile.
> There's a reason some ransomware doesn't run when your system has a Russian language keyboard, and it's not because they know Russians never pay ransom...
Many nations have active "digital warfare" programs, which may or may not take the form of ransomware. I would not be surprised if some would masquerade themselves as Russians masquerading as Israelis masquerading as Frenchs to poke on China, if all it takes is to carefully check and act on keyboard mapping. Don't you dare touching the colemak users.
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#67Everyone needs to ban Bitcoin... and likely other cryptocurrencies. Not only are they by far the biggest enablers of ransomware (which we're supposedly taking seriously now), but Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C. [1] Bitcoin already consumes 0.55% of energy produced globally. [2] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0321-8 [2] https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-a…
We need to ban all proof-of-work and generally all resource intensive cryptocurrencies.
One energy-efficient approach is the one used by the Pi network:
- https://minepi.com/
The whitepaper is pretty detailed about how they avoid the proof of work and the energy waste associated: - https://minepi.com/white-paper
If cryptos really make it in their ideological goal of a truly free capitalistic society, something like Pi which can be mined by everyone will have to win out over Bitcoin which can be "produced" only by already rich.
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#68I'm curious what's going to be left when the dust settles, probably in about 5 years. After all, since we're talking about the Netherlands, tulip bulbs are still around but most people don't care about them anymore.
Tulip mania was wildly exaggerated by Calvinists who wanted to create a precautionary tale against consumerism. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...
Yes Calvinism is still a strong influence in the Netherlands today. I really don't like this aspect of the country, I view it as a source of negativity. Things that are fun, new or nice automatically have a sidetone of 'sin', there is this mentality that there can be no enjoyment without enduring hardship and there is a strong sense of servitude and obedience. The other main religion in the Netherlands is Catholicism which is much more forgiving in this sense (you can make mistakes but can be forgiven by repenting) so it's not as strict. They have pretty wild parties around Carnival and then they're forgiven and disgressions forgotten. Letting off some steam. Calvinism doesn't believe in that, there's a saying "Just be normal, that's crazy enough".
Personally I'm from the non-religous areas and I'm very libertarian in societal views (and socialist in economic views - yes those go together :) ) so I'm pretty much diametrically opposed. There is still a strong sense of multiple groups of communities living together in one country, though it used to be a lot stronger. We used to all have our own schools, broadcasting companies, even banks. It was called 'Verzuiling' (meaning making pillars or more contemporary: silos)
But I don't really understand where the strictness comes from either, from their point of view. Calvinism believes in predestination, that our fates (going to heaven or hell) is predetermined. So I don't understand why they lead such rigid lives. Personally if I knew my fate was sealed I would just go all out on making fun since it wouldn't matter what I did anyway :)
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#69Nah, not based on this piece. This is the opinion of a director of one of many government agencies. CPB is the economic planning agency, so he is supposed to say things like this. But he is only one of many stakeholders in this subject. Once national bank, politics and public sentiment start making statements like this, it would get more weight.
There's no way The Netherlands is going to lead the pack so publically on banning cryptocurrencies. That would be too politically unwise.
I am not saying he is wrong. Just unlikely that The Netherlands is going to be the first to ban.
Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
#70A bit unrelated, but this submission was top 3 on HN and suddenly seems removed from the /news page?