The Dutch government’s CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) has released a report claiming that cryptocurrencies present a low risk to financial stability in the country, writes Cointelegraph.
The report, published on 29 May, was initiated in order to establish if cryptocurrencies posed any kind of economic risk in the light of its increasing use and popularity in Holland.
Because Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies reached the news often in 2017, approximately 60% of the households in the Netherlands who invest in cryptocurrencies started doing so in 2017. In the first three quarters of 2017, there were approximately 44,000 transactions in Bitcoin from the Netherlands on a trading platform called BTC Direct, according to Statistica.
The capital Amsterdam has transformed itself into a venue for crypto meetups and currently is hosting more than 550 full nodes, around 4.7% of the total nodes in the world, showing Bitcoin’s popularity across the country. This puts Holland in the world’s top 5 by node distribution.
The report shows that although cryptocurrencies pose a low risk to the financial system at this time due to comparatively low levels of capitalization, this risk would increase with an increase of involvement by government and financial institutions in the future. The CPB also pointed out that cryptocurrencies are not “money substitutes”, that users are more likely to hold on their crypto assets than actually spend them as they would a fiat currency.
The report stressed that a balanced financial regulation, rather than introducing harsh restraints, will reduce the risk of “shadow banks” emerging – non-bank financial intermediaries that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks.
In a landmark court case this year a Dutch court ordered a defendant to pay his debt in BTC since the obligation was originally made in Bitcoin.
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