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Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

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101–110 of 211 posts

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#101
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.

Like the stop sign bubble. Those stop signs dont actually stop cars, they just work because of the contagious narrative

This is so deep I can't tell if you're joking or not.

There are rural towns that have a completely different concept for a stop sign... backed by a lack of enforcement from officers.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#102

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…

Various valued materials that are valued only for their rarity are similarly unbacked, and also mined.

Most prominent metals have considerable industrial use, which makes those metals valuable, and makes them de facto backed in a big way (by the demand for them). Bitcoin has modest industrial/economic use, at present (and obviously other cryptos may present different advantages in that regard, given time).

You also can't physically wear Bitcoin and show off status, unlike Gold, Silver and Platinum.

If gold gets cheap enough people will use it in their wallpaper because humans have an insatiable demand for luxury goods. That will never change. It's why people still adorn themselves with sparkly rocks and shiny metals after 20,000 years of supposed evolution and refinement.

The store of value argument for Bitcoin is fully legitimate; as are the arguments for building potent economic uses on top of blockchains. There's no reason humans can't invent superior stores of value, and ever better transaction & contract systems. However, those various valued physical metals are not unbacked. Bitcoin is unbacked, and it can be replaced by other coins in the near future, coins that are technologically superior for storing value, and so on. The properties that we like metals for, industrially, make them difficult to replace in most cases; the demand - at an industrial minimum - will remain for a long time to come accordingly. And the human population keeps expanding (~80m per year), the odds are zero the next two billion people will suddenly stop having any interest in wearing/owning gold as a status symbol, and that puts an enormous demand factor under gold (on top of the fact that the median has gotten richer, so their demand for luxury goods has skyrocketed; see: China 1990-2020).

Try mining new sums of scarce metals, or any metals for that matter. Try inventing a new metal.

Now try cloning Bitcoin or Litecoin. Trivial, relatively speaking. There are thousands of bullshit crypto clones, and there will be thousands more to come. Bitcoin is temporarily special due to acceptance. There is little industrial demand under that fickleness however, which means Bitcoin can easily fall out of favor, exchanged for the next popular fad coin that people decide is the better way to store value (click, click, you just converted your Bitcoin over to the next more popular coin, byebye Bitcoin; now try that process with physical metals that you need for manufacturing purposes).

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#103
post #75
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 Until they switch currencies. For instance Brazil did this > The cruzeiro (Portuguese pronunciation: [kɾuˈzejɾu]) was the currency of Brazil from 1942 to 1986 (two distinct currencies) and again between 1990 and 1993. In August 1993 it was replaced by the short-lived Cruzeiro Real, it…

[Hi from Argentina!] I'm not sure about the details of the transitions in Brazil, but each time there is a change of money here the bank accounts are transformed instantly to the new denomination and the bills and coin coexist for some time, like 3 or 6 months. It's more a cosmetic change, to make the numbers no overflow in the bank system. It also has a psychological effect, because with the change the government pinky promise not to take stupid economic decisions and reduce the inflation.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the stop sign bubble. Those stop signs dont actually stop cars, they just work because of the contagious narrative

This is so deep I can't tell if you're joking or not. There are rural towns that have a completely different concept for a stop sign... backed by a lack of enforcement from officers.

It's actually a secret reference to the buddhist idea of "conventional reality", things that exist only by convention or agreement among people: political office, property ownership, money, diplomas, marriage, borders, ... most of modern life

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#105
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?

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#106
post #87

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…

> My main criticism to cryptocurrencies is that they're mostly unbacked. The fact of a currency being "backed" by something went away in 1933. No currency is "backed". > This makes me think cryptocurrencies are mainly about speculation more than rebelling against governments and central banks. Yeah, they are about speculation. Whether investing in crypto rather than some other financial asset constitutes "rebelling"…

Fiat currencies are mostly "backed" by the necessity to pay taxes and other government fees using them.

The US Dollar has the additional advantage of being the currency through which most large financial trade transactions are required to be paid.

Ultimately, however, this backing is mostly possible through the unexpressed coercive threat of legal action and ultimately force.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#107
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 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…

And not just any weapons but thousands of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so deep I can't tell if you're joking or not. There are rural towns that have a completely different concept for a stop sign... backed by a lack of enforcement from officers.

It's actually a secret reference to the buddhist idea of "conventional reality", things that exist only by convention or agreement among people: political office, property ownership, money, diplomas, marriage, borders, ... most of modern life

Schelling point is another name for this.

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#109
How?

100% tax on crypto-to-fiat transactions? National firewall inspecting traffic for numerically-low hashes? Police kicking down doors of suspected miners, looking for GPUs? Something else? I'm sympathetic to some of the reasons, but isn't the devil sort of in the details here?

Re: Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

#110
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, there's also the force of law behind stop signs.

Anecdote: I’ve seen a dozen people roll through stop signs today.

Anecdote: I saw someone this morning get pulled over for rolling through a stop sign.
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