[etrabroline]

Your view of government is highly authoritarian. If Bitcoin becomes legitimately popular, no government that needs the support of the people to rule can ban it.

Uber broke every taxi law on the books until popular support made those monopolistic laws unenforceable. The political actors working against Bitcoin own quite similar and quite unpopular state-backed monopolies of their own.

[wpietri]

Bitcoin at this point will never become "legitimately popular". It's had about as long as Uber, and it has only grown less relevant to people's lives for the last few years. M-Pesa, which only operates in a few countries, has something like 100x the transaction volume.

Further, the downsides to the rise of ridesharing were very modest for governments. Increased congestion, regulatory uncertainty, and the eventual need for new laws and regulations. But governments have a very strong interest in preventing money laundering because a) tax evasion means less money for the government, and b) serious, sustained crime requires money laundering to survive.

So even if Bitcoin were to become more popular, governments would still crack down on it, and people would happily go back to using things like Visa, Paypal, Venmo, etc.