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Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

cointelegraph.com

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Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#161

Post by ceejayoz »

dadoge wrote: post #110
iamben wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bitcoin over a bank account ? What's the advantage? I mean, if you don't have a bank account - "here, store everything you have on this phone [do you own a smartphone?], that requires an internet connection [can you afford that?]" - seems like a bigger step, no? Unless I'm missing something obvious?

That is a good question that I’ve thought about but haven’t dug enough to have a great answer. Blockstream is working to make internet more accessible there. It’ll be interesting to see how much penetration they get and how much it’ll cost folks there. Doesn’t need to be a brand new iPhone, but I do agree that phones are an initial cost and I’d be interested in seeing what are low-cost smart phone options there. That…

Did you read that Bitcoin Beach article at all?

> Gerard said it appears to work because the bitcoin donor keeps pumping bitcoin into the village’s system. “That’s not a proof of concept that works. That shows that you can trade this stuff if you’re not trading actual bitcoins and someone massively subsidizes it.”

> Edgar Magaña was in town from San Salvador to convert $50 to bitcoin. He inserted the dollars into the machine and was surprised to see only $47 in bitcoin fractions credited to his account on his phone. “They took three dollars commission,” Magaña said, adding that he had understood there was no commission. “This is like in the banks.”

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#162

Post by Agamemnom »

dadoge wrote: post #129
bart_spoon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to be clear, a country where 70% of individuals are unable to get access to a bank account do have consistent access to the internet, a smart phone or specialized hardware for carrying a wallet app, and are fine with storing their wealth in a vehicle that consistently swings in value in the double digits within 24 hours? The delusion regarding crypto has reached parody levels. This reads like something out of an O…

Read about the Bitcoin beach experiments there before jumping to conclusions like that https://apnews.com/article/caribbean-el-salvador-bitcoin-lif...

Not the OP, but I don't really get it. Maybe I'm missing something.

They're basically creating cash accounts? Not quite a bank but... not far off it. I feel like a simpler solution is just mandating that banks are required to offer a basic cash account at a set maximum cost.

It doesn't feel like the bitcoin part of the experiment is really doing anything special. It's all in a single app and all held by a holding org. They just track who has how much of the reserve.

Not really the free and open bitcoin?

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#163

Post by read_if_gay_ »

imtringued wrote: post #154
read_if_gay_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that military count towards the US dollar's impact on the climate?

Only partially, because the US military protects more than just the US dollar banking system. For example, the US military protects the united states and everything inside it. Bitcoin mining only protects the currency and since Bitcoin is exactly like fiat in the sense that it is just a ledger that allocates resources, it is entirely dependent on the physical world that the all the militaries around the world protect…

Clearly not all of the military should count towards the dollar’s climate impact, not even close, but some of it wouldn’t be needed without the dollar, and that should count.

What portions of the government and military could be dropped if the US dollar hegemony didn’t need to be maintained? What could be dropped if we didn’t need banks to handle money?

This is of course impossible to quantify accurately, but it shows the picture isn’t as simple as “ban BTC because it uses more power than Argentina”; an angle that’s thrown around a lot around here.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#164

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #127
kokx wrote: post #27

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.

Two hypotheticals: 1) BTC replaces all world currencies, then crashes to $0.005/BTC (PPP) 2) BTC crashes today to $0.005/BTC In which hypothetical does the crash cause least damage?

[deleted]

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#165

Post by afiori »

dijit wrote: post #136
adwi wrote: post #113

Re the carbon footprint argument with Bitcoin: 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…

This equivocation has been investigated quite succinctly: http://climatestate.com/2018/01/15/energy-consumption-bitcoi... .

> [all the banks in the world have] a total [consumption] of close to a 100 terawatt hours a year.

> The highest estimates for Bitcoins annual terawatt hours consumption is 28.67. This means, more than 3 times more efficient than a very conservative calculation of the cost of the global banking system.

I think that a "transaction count" and/or "services provided" are missing from the calculation.

ultimately it does nothing to answer the only relevant question: if the entire banking/financial system switched to bitcoins/crypto would consumption increase or decrease?

I personally think it would be very hard to argue the case of a decrease

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#166

Post by dadoge »

ceejayoz wrote: post #161
dadoge wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good question that I’ve thought about but haven’t dug enough to have a great answer. Blockstream is working to make internet more accessible there. It’ll be interesting to see how much penetration they get and how much it’ll cost folks there. Doesn’t need to be a brand new iPhone, but I do agree that phones are an initial cost and I’d be interested in seeing what are low-cost smart phone options there. That…

Did you read that Bitcoin Beach article at all? > Gerard said it appears to work because the bitcoin donor keeps pumping bitcoin into the village’s system. “That’s not a proof of concept that works. That shows that you can trade this stuff if you’re not trading actual bitcoins and someone massively subsidizes it.” > Edgar Magaña was in town from San Salvador to convert $50 to bitcoin. He inserted the dollars into the…

Wasn’t perfect, but “enough” of a success.

Notice you cherry picking only the negative quotes…

I’d be shocked, and annoyed, if those fees continue in the future as the infra scales up

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#167

Post by CyberDildonics »

dadoge wrote: post #110
iamben wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bitcoin over a bank account ? What's the advantage? I mean, if you don't have a bank account - "here, store everything you have on this phone [do you own a smartphone?], that requires an internet connection [can you afford that?]" - seems like a bigger step, no? Unless I'm missing something obvious?

That is a good question that I’ve thought about but haven’t dug enough to have a great answer. Blockstream is working to make internet more accessible there. It’ll be interesting to see how much penetration they get and how much it’ll cost folks there. Doesn’t need to be a brand new iPhone, but I do agree that phones are an initial cost and I’d be interested in seeing what are low-cost smart phone options there. That…

The same company that thinks bitcoin needs to be kept to a few kilobytes per second is going to give El Salvidor internet? Let's not get carried away with the promises and propaganda, anyone can sell the future. These are the same people that thought it was better to make a fragile and complicated second layer over the course of the last seven years rather than increase the block size to more than 1 MB every 10 minutes. I don't know why anyone would pay attention to them other than not realizing they've been sucked in to a /r/bitcoin bubble where anything reasonable comment is deleted.

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#168

Post by afiori »

keymone wrote: post #158
MereInterest wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got it, so you're separating out the energy requirements into two buckets, then pretending that those two are unrelated. I agree that in general, processing transactions is not an energy-intensive task. This is why traditional payment processors with trusted nodes are able to do so efficiently. In the case of cryptocurrency, where the assumption is that all nodes are inherently untrustworthy, the resource requirement…

> When people say "transactions cost X amount to process", they mean "in the current state of bitcoin", not in the past when there were very few transaction validators there are only so many miners (and so much energy spent) because security of bitcoin is what gives it value. so when people say "transactions cost X amount to process" they are saying something non-sensical, because it's not transactions that cost , it…

this is pretty much the same thing as saying that "guns kills people" is nonsensical because there are many non equivalent ways a gun could be involved in killing someone

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#169

Post by afiori »

dexen wrote: post #71
axlee wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remind me the carbon footprint and transaction costs of Bitcoin again, and compare that to the costs from institutional payment gateways?

>the carbon footprint of Bitcoin Still less than the carbon footprint of the people running our current fiat-based financial infrastructure. It's the bankers who have jets, mansions and yachts, not the bitcoiners. Edit to clarify: Not that riches is somehow "wrong" - it's just that with major value comes major costs, which in practice mean major energy usage .

statistically speaking drunk drivers (as a total) cause less incidents of sober drivers (as a total)

Re: Dutch official calls for complete ban on Bitcoin

#170

Post by apexalpha »

wardb wrote: post #25
neals wrote: post #10

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'.

This description is too funny :) It does have a high amount of old man screaming at the cloud. You can have a lot of valid critical views of cryptocurrency (environmental impact / gambling aspect ), but this his view is very unhelpful Does CPB actually has anything to say here? I was expecting "De Nederlandse Bank" to be the organisation to set the rules here.

Does CPB actually has anything to say here?

No. They deliver forecasts and analysis for government policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_for_Economic_Policy_Ana...

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