Dutch official wants the Netherlands to ban Bitcoin

Pieter Hasekamp, director of the Dutch Bureau for Economic Analysis, has called for a complete ban on Bitcoin.

In a recently published essay titled “The Netherlands must ban bitcoin,” Hasekamp argued that Bitcoin does not meet any of the three functions of money, and as a result, the Netherlands must outlaw the mining, holding, or trading of Bitcoin.

The director gave a plethora of reasons why the Dutch government must enforce an immediate and total ban on Bitcoin. For one, Bitcoin “has no intrinsic value and is only valuable because others may accept it.” He also noted that Bitcoin fails as a unit of account, a means of payments, and as a store of value. Furthermore, he pulled another popular anti-Bitcoin narrative bothering on security concerns, risks of scams, and the use of cryptocurrencies for illicit financing.

Hasekamp opined that the Netherlands was lagging behind other countries on its stance to “curb the crypto hype.” He may be referring to China’s move to intensify its clampdown on Bitcoin mining and trading. He wrote:

Dutch regulators attempted to tighten up the supervision of trading platforms, but without much success. The Central Planning Bureau pointed out the risks of crypto trading in 2018, but concluded that stricter regulation was not yet necessary.