Ban cryptocurrencies as soon as possible – a Dutch official proposes | Invezz

Pieter Hasekamp, Dutch Bureau for Economic Analysis, has stated that the government has to ban cryptocurrencies in the country. According to him, crypto assets are extremely volatile and a crash of the market is unavoidable. Hasekamp said the Netherlands should act as soon as possible. He added,

For investors and the governments alike, the last person to act is the loser.

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Hasekamp also said that several countries have taken steps to limit the use of cryptocurrencies and their trading due to their financial instability, criminal use, and severe fraud cases.

While the Netherlands has been making concerted efforts to increase its regulations on cryptocurrencies, they have not been successful. Hasekamp stated that the Netherlands is lagging in such struggles to curtail the use of crypto assets.

Difficulty in banning cryptocurrencies

The nature of cryptocurrencies and the fact they are mostly traded online make them very difficult to ban completely by the government.

Crypto assets are also not issued by financial institutions, so the government doesn’t have control over their use and distribution.

Their decentralized nature and the fact that they are mostly traded internationally make it even harder to prevent people from trading or investing in them.

Some officials are not buying Hasekamp’s idea

While Hasekamp is proposing a complete ban on cryptocurrencies, some of his colleagues have different ideas. For example, the Dutch Minister of Finance Wopke Hoekstra has been against the ban of cryptocurrencies. When the government proposed a ban on digital assets in 2018, he was one of the government officials that opposed the idea.

However, Hasekamp is still standing on his grounds, explaining that people have a wrong view of crypto assets. According to him, people think that cryptocurrencies will replace fiat currency in the future, but that is never going to happen.

Hazekamp’s statement is coming barely a week after the Chinese government banned cryptocurrency mining in the country. This has led to a mass exodus of crypto miners from China, a country where the majority of the world’s crypto mining hash rate is generated.