Dutch Official Says BTC Mining, Trading and Holding Must be Banned

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Pieter Hasekamp, director of the Bureau for Economic Analysis under the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy of The Netherlands, has just called for a complete prohibition on Bitcoin.

According to the essay “The Netherlands must ban bitcoin,” whose title talks by itself, Hasekamp says that Bitcoin mining, trading and holding must be banned because the currency doesn’t meet any of the three functions of money (unit of account, means of payment and store of value) and is a tool that criminals can use to carry out illegal actions.

In addition, he continues saying that Bitcoin “has no intrinsic value and is only valuable because others may accept it.”

He claims that other countries have been more proactive than The Netherlands and have adopted measures to “curb the crypto hype.” According to him, the country’s authorities tried to exert a tighter control on trading platforms in 2018, however, they did not succeed.