Even if you ban crypto exchanges and money transfers to them, you cannot ban a single entity called Bitcoin Co, nor you can ban individuals from possessing it.
You could potentially ban crypto miners from using the electrical energy, but that doesn't ban Bitcoin either.
Any other ideas? :)
Laws already exist requiring gatekeepers of the financial system (e.g. Banks and payment processors) to monitor transactions on illegalities, e.g. money laundering. Bitcoin would just be added to the list. Banks are required to set-up their own systems for this. It'd be trivial for banks to find out which bank accounts are owned by exchanges or bitcoin companies like Coinbase, and close those bank accounts, as well as freeze any transactions to these bank accounts. New companies can't open new accounts. If you try to make transactions you get your money frozen/seized. And even if you hold bitcoin, to use your profits (e.g. to buy a house, a car, pay rent) you'd need to go back to dollars through a bank, or launder tons of cash, or find a counterparty to your transaction willing to illegally accept bitcoin e.g. when selling his house, all things extremely unlikely to happen at any scale by regular joes.
At that point the amount of capital flowing to bitcoin will massively decline and bitcoin plummets. Nobody is investing in an asset class speculatively if the only way to buy it is to go to a street corner and meet up with an Internet Guy with a bunch of cash. That's fine for buying drugs, it's not going to drive a trillion dollar market cap (like today) illegal virtual coin that's otherwise useless.
All of the following are entirely feasible measures for "banning bitcoin" that are already applied to other things:
- directly ban sales or receipts through normal financial intermediaries (banks etc). Try to wire money to Coinbase and get prosecuted.
- directly ban advertising of cryptocurrency products (problem here is you hit the celebrities, good luck prosecuting Musk in NL)
- directly ban holding or making cryptocurrency transactions. Not very effective, but provides an additional charge that can be made against people who've been prosecuted and had their computers seized for other reasons (e.g. drugs, CP). Incidentally criminalizes paying ransoms!
- use all the anti-CP measures against Bitcoin related sites; put the exchanges and known network nodes on the IWF blocklist.
- put bitcoin related software on AV alert lists (I think this has already happened with miner software because it keeps getting installed by malware)
- add it to the list of things checked in border phone sweeps. I don't think NL does a lot of these, but you occasionally hear about the US doing them. Some countries have also started doing device searches as part of other police searches, e.g. https://www.scotland.police.uk/spa-media/zqxibu3s/cyber-kios... ; combine with the ban on crypto tech and this can be used to prosecute people for having cryptocurrency apps on their phones.
Does anyone else remember the "crypto is a munition" era? It used to be illegal to export actually secure crypto from the US, which meant in practice it was illegal to host it on US-based websites. I'm not sure it's possible to go back to that era, but it's possible to imagine github banning crypto-related apps due to international pressure.
The point is that bitcoin exited before there where institutions built around it, you can ban those institutions you can ban coal power plants you can ban whatever you want people will still continue to use it the way they currently do.
Mine bitcoin on renewable energy not connected to the grid and transact with each other not large institutions, if you want to ban bitcoin you need to prevent the core value of bitcoin not just show off your fud.
Let's see.. i earn my wage with money. I pay my taxes with money. I pay everything with money. I can pay almost nothing with bitcoin and it's getting worse.
> people will still continue to use it [bitcoin] the way they currently do
They are using it for speculation and for ransomware. Seems like both of these uses will be hindered by outlawing all official exchanges.
Yeah, make it illegal.
Good luck with that :)
I guess we might just as well make murder legal as well, since it's some people will still kill each other no whether it's illegal or not.
It is basically saying: You are forced to participate in our inflationary financial system or we will arrest you.
Climate change will probably kill millions and Bitcoin is creating an economical incetive to accelerate it.
By shopping for food you are also creating an economical incentive for companies to produce which accelerates climate change.
Please, lets be serious and reasonable.
Bitcoin probably creates more incentives for renewable energy (because it enables to "store" it) than any other initiative.