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Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

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Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#171

Post by hippich »

mortehu wrote: post #15
kuroguro wrote: post #6

There's plenty of valid criticisms against crypto, I feel like they've picked some of the weakest ones. > cryptocurrencies are used because people think they will one day replace traditional money Maybe a tiny minority, sounds like a strawman. > a contagious story in which people believe because other people believe in it Isn't fiat the same? Money only has value because people believe it has value / will have value…

Fiat is slightly different in that the government can guarantee a certain level of demand for it by requiring taxes to be paid in it. If you you don't like jail and have a tax liability in US, you can't think dollars are worthless.

If you owe taxes and don't have dollars, but have property, IRS will gladly take that. And I doubt they will look at what type of property it is - a house, a stock, a crypto.

Except in the last case, if you use your own keys, you have a choice of either going to jail and keeping the money, or giving it away in exchange for your freedom. In all other cases the only option to hold on to the property - is successfully physically fight with law enforcement to defend your rights to the property (which is quite futile for the most of us).

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#172

Post by Aunche »

Hoasi wrote: post #84

> "Cryptocurrencies are essentially neither money nor a financial product, but an example of what Nobel laureate Robert Shiller calls a 'contagious narrative': a contagious story in which people believe because other people believe in it." Which is exactly what money is, to begin with.

You don't need to believe in money for it to work. People use the dollar, not because they insist the dollar is valuable, but because the dollar is convenient.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#173

Post by rustybelt »

michaelscott wrote: post #125
jokethrowaway wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiat is backed by weapons. The same weapons that defend your house from other countries and force you to give up half your salary. My main criticism to cryptocurrencies is that they're mostly unbacked. The ones that are backed by Fiat have similar problems to Fiat currency (why would I need that?), the ones that are backed by physical assets are much more interesting - but they don't seem to be the mainstream ones, p…

> Fiat is backed by weapons. The same weapons that defend your house from other countries and force you to give up half your salary This is a very American view of fiat (and governmental role in general). It's a logic that only works if you're talking about the strongest military and associated country out of all alternatives, and at this point it falls apart. How do weapons protect the value of the Angolan kwanza or…

Any government that only accepts payment for taxes or other obligations in their own currency is backing their currency with the force of law and creating real demand for it.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#174

Post by bpt3 »

felipeko wrote: post #40
chadash wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this different from money or the financial markets? A big difference is that the sovereign requires you to pay taxes in a given currency at the threat of punishment. So long as everyone needs to pay the taxman, the currency that the tax man accepts is gonna have at least some value.

They can make this difference disappear by accepting bitcoin then.

Taxes will still be calculated in the local currency, not in BTC.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#175

Post by EvilEy3 »

rantwasp wrote: post #112
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #20

Bans are totally justified. They will achieve two major outcomes: 1. Tank the price, thus freeing up energy and advanced manufactured goods (which are in shortages right now) for proper productive use. 2. Significantly lessen the instances of Ransomware, since companies will have no legal mechanism to actually pay. Whether the coins continue to exist informally and are traded in some kind of primitive barter system i…

yup. also we’ll end covid, catch all the people involved in human trafficking, give everyone free clean water, free organic food, free internet and a free tesla. climate change? gone. everyone’s IQ is gonna increase by 120 points. We’re gonna develop space technology that will put us on another habitable planet, outside of the solar system before the end of the decade!!! next time you think a ban is a good thing, ima…

Of course not, meme currency will do that! Look how much good did it bring, all those GPU shortages, all the wasted electricity.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#176

Post by huerlisi1 »

Salgat wrote: post #165
Hoasi wrote: post #84

> "Cryptocurrencies are essentially neither money nor a financial product, but an example of what Nobel laureate Robert Shiller calls a 'contagious narrative': a contagious story in which people believe because other people believe in it." Which is exactly what money is, to begin with.

No, money has value because the government makes it law that debt is payable with it; that's what gives a government's currency legitimacy. If the government made a law that debt could be paid with bitcoin, it would no longer fit Shiller's description.

We can pay local taxes in Bitcoin in Zug, Switzerland.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-03/swiss-can...

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#177

Post by flerchin »

rijoja wrote: post #67
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #20

Bans are totally justified. They will achieve two major outcomes: 1. Tank the price, thus freeing up energy and advanced manufactured goods (which are in shortages right now) for proper productive use. 2. Significantly lessen the instances of Ransomware, since companies will have no legal mechanism to actually pay. Whether the coins continue to exist informally and are traded in some kind of primitive barter system i…

How would you enforce the ban in practical terms?

You just make it illegal to exchange fiat for crypto. Done.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#178

Post by md_ »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #170
md_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent is talking about chartalism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism ), which is essentially the idea that fiat currencies derive their value from the fact that taxes must be paid in them. A sort of "just so" story about this would go something like (with much credit to David Graeber): "Way back when, some Assyrian king got the great idea to, instead of giving their soldiers food and drink, give…

> the Somali shilling Pump the breaks. Have you read the Wikipedia page about the Somali Shilling? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somali_shilling > Following the breakdown in central authority that accompanied the civil war beginning in the early 1990s, the value of the Somali shilling plunged. The Central Bank of Somalia, the nation's monetary authority, also shut down operations. Rival producers of the local currenc…

Interesting, thanks!

I certainly agree with what you wrote. But I think the point still stands that this is hardly black and white—the shilling did supposedly stay in circulation, right?

The argument about taxes and legal tender certainly show ways to increase demand for a currency, but they appear to be somewhat unnecessary, as with BTC.

We may in fact be agreeing. My premise is that chartalism is an interesting idea which can help color questions of why a given currency becomes accepted, but ultimately isn't literally true—other mechanisms of increasing demand for a currency may also be effective.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#179

Post by paulryanrogers »

practice9 wrote: post #150
paulryanrogers wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the fundamentals of the Internet were sound and scalable: near instant global communication and commerce. Cyroptocoin fundamentals don't offer much (any?) value over digitized fiat systems once externalities are considered.

> Cyroptocoin fundamentals don't offer much (any?) value over digitized fiat systems once externalities are considered. If I'm not mistaken, Bitcoin whitepaper was originally about easy P2P payments. Bitcoin has not full-filled this vision yet, but the cryptosphere as a whole is working on this (if you ignore the hype and speculation). Visa/Mastercard, PayPal, banks can block or prohibit any kind of transactions if t…

That's a good point about banks fleecing people for remittances. Still, that's a political problem which doesn't outweigh the downsides of DeFi today, IMO. Maybe you're correct that other coins will find a sweet spot. But I suspect the politics cannot be bypassed forever, no matter what the medium of exchange.

> And don't get me started on the absolutely insane inheritance taxes in some countries - the state is effectively robbing people (and their descendants) after their death.

There is a balance here too. When the wealthy can shop for tax and wealth havens until (almost) nothing is ever returned, they essentially rob the communities that supported and made them rich in the first place.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#180

Post by lucb1e »

DSingularity wrote: post #105
lucb1e wrote: post #5

I was happily surprised to see someone proposing this, assuming it was about PoW when reading the headline... but unfortunately it's just someone trying to time the market on our behalf?! Like, should we also ban stock trading when we expect the next pandemic or .com bubble?

Do you consider the fact that some people get really hurt by bubbles?

But, like, the reason they lose money is because they invest what they can't stand to lose. If you want to solve that problem, then pass a law that banks should stop transactions to investment platforms if the person has less than an average monthly income's worth of money on their account (to be clear, I'm not in favor of that, just that this would solve the issue you're seeing without the guesswork of timing a bubble). Telling the whole world "btw this bubble might burst" isn't going to protect your citizens better than anyone else, especially not the gambling types that get hurt by these sorts of events.
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