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CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

netherlandsnewslive.com

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Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#71

Post by henearkr »

knuthsat wrote: post #19
dataflow wrote: post #4

Everyone 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…

Global warming above 2°C will happen just by the nature of n-th order effects. Trees burning, methane stored in tundra getting released can have decades of CO2 equivalent emissions compared to 1 human civilization year. Bitcoin has a small effect compared to everything else we do and everything else that will happen. Human civilization isn't exactly living as optimal as possible and I do not see why Bitcoin needs to…

Maybe?

Although, which one do you think is easier to ban?

If cryptocurrencies were to disappear tomorrow, would the everyday life change? And if we ban meat? Which one do you think will encounter the most resistance? So which one is the most feasible? And then, which one do you think has the best return on investment?

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#72

Post by xiphias2 »

Guggenheim and Elon Musk were heavily pushing the environmental disaster articles to move Bitcoin price down to buy (they just filed an SEC report about holding Bitcoin futures 2 days ago). As Bitcoin's not a security, they can legally push any news that they want to manipulate the price.

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#73

Post by adflux »

Tepix wrote: post #51
adflux wrote: post #25

"A cryptocurrency crash is inevitable", he says, as if its a certainty. I hate energy wasting crypto's and delusional moonboys, shitcoins and NFT's just about as much as anyone else, but saying things like this is just dumb...

We've head many cryptocurrency crashes already so chances are pretty good that he is right ;-)

A stock market crash is inevitable, let's ban the stock market!

A commodity crash is inevitable, let's ban trading commodities!

A housing market crash is inevitable, let's ban real estate purchasing!

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#74

Post by masswerk »

atom_arranger wrote: post #46
hnbad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, by "ability to print money and steal" you mean having a central bank and levying taxes? You're making a moral argument against the idea of government controlled currency in general, yes? Can you clarify why you think controlled currencies are morally bad and how cryptocurrencies are better? I'd love to hear a less abstract argument than "more freedom". EDIT: I assume downvotes mean there are people…

By printing money the government steals value from existing holders of currency. It’s effectively an undemocratic (amount is not generally voted on) tax on people’s earnings and cash savings.

Inflation/deflation is an effect of the amount of money (or in general: any kind of material compensation for trade, work and services) available and which potential customers are able to spend and the amount of goods (and the capabilities to produce them), which are actually available. Meaning, it's a function and not necessarily a conspiracy.

Edit: In other words, if you are working really hard and are making earnings which allow you to spend more on Teslas than Musk can produce, you are creating inflation. Money or other tokens.

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#75

Post by hnbad »

yenwel wrote: post #30
hnbad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be clear, by "ability to print money and steal" you mean having a central bank and levying taxes? You're making a moral argument against the idea of government controlled currency in general, yes? Can you clarify why you think controlled currencies are morally bad and how cryptocurrencies are better? I'd love to hear a less abstract argument than "more freedom". EDIT: I assume downvotes mean there are people…

money printing is done by handing it to banks at zero interest and flooded on the stock exchanges. The rich get richer and the poor can buy less with the same money since wages are the last thing to raise (while the rich buy up houses and commodities with their free money). Inflation is a tax on the poor and elderly. Literally since VAT is percentage-wise levied on relatively more expensive consumer goods and if wage…

Okay, and how do cryptocurrencies fix this?

Mining is supposed to be increasingly cost prohibitive so in an ideal world it would eventually cease to have a meaningful impact on currency supply within practical timeframes. Assuming economic growth holds, this would mean constant deflation (i.e. value of the currency continually increases as its supply remains quasi constant while the overall economy increases).

Since transfer of cryptocurrencies incurs transaction fees and the value of those currencies only ever increases, transactions would eventually become cost prohibitive for smaller values. So realistically it would seem that we'd eventually have to transition to representative money instead (i.e. you don't transfer crypto between wallets, you shift numbers in a trusted third party's database which itself holds crypto for you). This would lose most of the benefit of the blockchain for these smaller transactions and effectively create banks because these third parties would have operating expenses they would have to charge you for (either directly or by using your crypto for investments).

So in other words, this sounds a lot like returning to the gold standard with extra steps.

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#76

Post by teekert »

dataflow wrote: post #4

Everyone 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…

Ban knifes! The biggest enabler of stabbings!

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#77

Post by knuthsat »

henearkr wrote: post #71
knuthsat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Global warming above 2°C will happen just by the nature of n-th order effects. Trees burning, methane stored in tundra getting released can have decades of CO2 equivalent emissions compared to 1 human civilization year. Bitcoin has a small effect compared to everything else we do and everything else that will happen. Human civilization isn't exactly living as optimal as possible and I do not see why Bitcoin needs to…

Maybe? Although, which one do you think is easier to ban? If cryptocurrencies were to disappear tomorrow, would the everyday life change? And if we ban meat? Which one do you think will encounter the most resistance? So which one is the most feasible? And then, which one do you think has the best return on investment?

Best return on investment is most definitely finding new ways to produce energy and new ways to sequester greenhouse gases.

Anything else is a minor dampener to an exponential process.

Getting rid of Bitcoin is absolutely nothing compared to our exponentially increasing energy needs.

Lowering greenhouse emissions to 0 today would still result in dire consequences when the temperature increase comes, just from the massive n-th order effects.

I have no idea how the opinion of Bitcoin being so detrimental to climate came to fruition and how it's considered plausible at all.

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#78

Post by dataflow »

teekert wrote: post #76
dataflow wrote: post #4

Everyone 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…

Ban knifes! The biggest enabler of stabbings!

Because the cost/benefit ratio of Bitcoin is even on the same planet as that of knives?

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#79

Post by bigger_inside »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #24
dataflow wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

Clears throat... [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...

...and the US military effectively backs the dollar, which makes this the energy footprint of the dollar.

meanwhile, gold stripmines the soil in poor countries, where children die in mines, while the loot is carried off to the west, AND it uses much more energy than bitcoin.

and bitcoin is technology to replace, at least partially, those two things. And like a car versus a bike, it does so with more utility: better to store, better to transport, better to divide into units.

and it can use energy anywhere, whereas banks and gold mining have to use it where there is gold and people to use banks, which means that energy for these uses is actually newly made for this purpose. Bitcoin often and increasingly uses energy that was made, but not used: 1/3 of all global energy production is produced and then just seeps into the metaphorical ground, which is necessary as a network safety measure. Bitcoin miners put their ASICs there and take it, meaning no additional energy was produced and the opposite of waste occured: it prevented waste. Not to speak of the fact that bitcoin incentivizes green energy, because solar and wind are problematic for everyday use (bc you're so highly dependent on the whims of nature). Bitcoin is not your dryer; it can run whenenever it happens to be there, thereby increasing the efficiency of renewables massively.

This whole argument suffers from a lot of ignorance about what's actually going on here.

Re: CPB director: The Netherlands must ban Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

#80

Post by teekert »

skrebbel wrote: post #9
22c wrote: post #5

The 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".

What is this bubble? I’ve been having and using (ordered some RPi’s and sushi mainly) since 2014. And I makes some money here and there. I can’t really feel sorry for people who go all in now and lose later. It’s a casino people!
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