Putting aside for a moment whether this will actually happen, I would like to ask: how?
How do you effectively ban circulation of certain types of information?
The entertainment industry didn't manage to achieve this over the last 20 years.
How do you effectively ban circulation of certain types of information?
The entertainment industry didn't manage to achieve this over the last 20 years.
The entertainment industry has been unlucky that it hasn't managed to make the use of torrent illegal. They have to monitor the trackers and figure out who is sharing their copyrighted works and then send threatening emails and hope someone will comply. Instead since they would be banning cryptocurrencies completely they would be able to straight up block connections to cryptocurrency nodes.
You could still use a vpn to use cryptocurrencies, but still buying cryptocurrencies with money would be difficult enough to dissuade most people from doing so.
Then it’s simply a question of confiscating whatever you turn your Bitcoin into. It’s usually how they deal with criminal gangs as well. “Can’t prove how you managed to buy a million dollar mansion while being unemployed?”, it is now the governments property… The primary reason it doesn’t really work on crime in general is because most of the money doesn’t stay where the drugs are sold, but most Bitcoin speculators/investors aren’t setup to live outside “the law”.
In Holland it could be as easy as simply having the banks confiscate any money that arrive from exchanges and blocking any transfers in the other direction. It wouldn’t exactly end Bitcoin as you point out, but it would make them rather worthless to most people.
This is an important question for our right to privacy too. Lets say that we succeed in replacing law with code, which we are doing but not very successfully. We can not rely on hardware like DRM does. We need to integrate a censor into the network.
Something that might work is a system like Ethereum's distributed virtual machine, and a much more involved version of smart contracts. Then you could fingerprint your private data, upload your fingerprint to each smart contract platform, and financial penalties are applied to those who transfer your data on the network without your permission.
I think we can replace most of government functions and services with a selection of apps that you subscribe to / tax you. I recently started working in earnest on the idea after being inspired by Project Cybersyn's planned economy.
You can make the cybernetic system democratic by treating likes/dislikes as votes; data to feed a recommender algorithm with. If the algo is expensive like NNMF you can use that as proof of work with real value. With enough data, the algo becomes a personal agent which can predict how the digital citizen will vote, and possibly able to do work with real value. It could perhaps negotiate a smart contract for you without interactivity.
IMO, if the Netherlands bans bitcoin, they will also ban other similar cryptos that could actually be used as currencies. That negatively impacts the crypto markets for sure. It's not just about bitcoin.
Would such a ban be hard to enforce? Sure, but not everyone feels comfortable doing things that could land them huge fines or even jail time. I certainly don't.
Gold is used as a store of value because it's been universally recognized as valuable for thousands of years, in almost every culture. Would you really trust your life savings to bitcoin if we're in a climate where more and more countries are banning it? That would make redeeming your digital gold increasingly more illegal and difficult. Crypto bans definitely erode the "digital gold" proposition as well IMO.