Bitcoin would be a lot less interesting to its proponents if it were to become illegal to interact with the network and every "legitimate business" suddenly can't operate in the US anymore.
Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
As soon as one miner goes down another one will come up because it is profitable, yes maybe they can stop it in the US, but at this point the network effect and momentum is too strong, allot of money is invested in it. The FBI would have to trap over so many people and entities around the world to stop it.
I think the only way to stop bitcoin is economically, like say Satoshi appears destabilizing the market.
Depending on "which" miners are shut down there is some potential for problems - if it is/was possible to shutdown a large percentage of the hashing power of the network then the difficulty to could be too high for the remaining miners to continue the chain (without it being so slow that it's unusable until enough blocks are mined to reduce the difficulty).
There's also the issue that, if governments are seizing the mining hardware, if they gather enough of it they could perform 51% attacks against the chain to effectively prevent it from working.
this is quite unlikely though. For comparison, during the Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash wars in late 2017, the main BTC block time went up to an hour - and pretty much nobody noticed, because all the excitement of the crypto bubble was happening on the exchanges, not on chain.
It's not about miners but about the users/investors. If US investors - which make up a huge fraction of money bet on Bitcoin - are excluded, the value goes way down and makes it less attractive also to non-US investors; another major use case is remittances but if people remitting money from USA to their relatives in third world can't legitimately buy Bitcoin from their creditcard or bank account, then that makes it less useful as a money transfer vehicle.
"Satoshi" is missing and that is part of the allure of BTC since it started from nothing. No premine, no vc investment, no corporate backing.
That said, there is an early wallet that is attributed to Satoshi with a giant amount of early mined BTC in it. If it ever moves, people will flip out.
"Nakamoto owns between 750,000 and 1,100,000 bitcoin. As of November 2021, that puts his net worth at up to 73 billion US dollars, which would make him the 15th richest person in the world.[21]"
There are a large number of BTC that have not moved since its early days which are largely believed to be / have been controlled by Satoshi, and if they were to move now, there would most likely be some sort of at least temporary price shock because market participants have been largely assuming that they will never move.
Maybe Big Media can't make bittorent and piratebay go away entirely, but they've put one hell of a dent in the whole ecosystem of piracy. Used to be I could use Covenant[2] on Kodi[0] and stream anything for free, in a multitude of languages and formats, with downloadable subs if desired. It was a golden age, and it is gone now.
Similarly, I've watched several retro-game preservation communities[1] I've been a part of disappear mysteriously overnight. Certain sets are still very difficult to find on public trackers and the private ones are difficult to get into.
In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient.
[0] Yes, I know this isn't backed by bittorrent.
[1] Backed by bittorrent but having little to do with Hollywood.
[2] Actually I guess Exodus was first. I always forget which one was the fork.
I don't think Hollywood or "Big Media" killed the torrent scene. I think netflix and hulu and other services that make it cheap and easy to access the content you want. They provide a "good enough" service to give people what they want, so people aren't going to invest the time to learn how to torrent safely.
Yeah, that's my point though: Even if states can't stop BTC from operating entirely, they can make it so inconvenient that it is basically useless for most people.
You can’t get rid of Bitcoin, but if you make it illegal for retailers to accept Bitcoin and for currency exchanges like Coinbase to operate its pretty much taken care of.
The time for that has passed, you have Coinbase listed on the NASDAQ, you dont just make something like that illegal overnight. As I said the ship has sailed, squashing it is harder now that crypto firms can hire their own lobbysists
The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not.
I think the CIA likes having Bitcoin as a means for foreign nationals to exfiltrate money. That's harder to do now in certain countries, but still possible.
And the FBI likes being able to watch where the money flows.
Yes, but I thought the whole point of prohibition (unless you're living in that weird period between 18th amendment and 21st amendment) is that it was a terrible idea, never to be repeated again.
> The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not.
This doesn't make sense, you presume that Fed has zero understanding of consequences of their actions.
Fed may consider something to be a risk and yet not act on it. Just because they haven't acted on it, doesn't mean they don't consider it to be a risk.
I am fairly sure there would be constitutional issues with banning it. After all its just some characters/a string. We went through a lot of this with the cryptography wars in the 90s
Something something color of your bits. And even if you somehow managed to convince someone that a digital asset was speech you still have to contend that commercial speech isn't as protected.
I remember prohibition, do you? It enriched a number of people willing to break the law, only to be repealed in a short time, when it was found to entirely useless and simple to get around.
Alcohol was only illegal in the US, unless there is a worldwide ban it will be fine. I have survived this long without ever setting foot in the USA, I reckon I can manage a bit longer.
It almost is, actually. The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited.
Part one would be a note of the laws establishing the Treasury Department's mandate to regulate financial instruments.
Part two would be a finding that cryptocurrencies are harmful to the interests of the USA.
Part three would be an order to the Secretary of the Treasury to determine what businesses are involved in cryptocurrencies, and to take the following sanctions: ...
prohibit any transfers of credit or payments between financial institutions, or by, through, or to any financial institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and involve any interest of the sanctioned business;
prohibit any United States financial institution from making loans or providing credit to the sanctioned business;
(iv) prohibit any transactions in foreign exchange that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and in which the sanctioned business has any interest;
(v) prohibit any United States person from investing in or purchasing significant amounts of equity or debt instruments of the sanctioned business;
Form and specific sanctions taken from EO 2021-27505, from December 17 2021.
> The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited.
"Untestedly" being the important part. There is no practical limit on the orders that can be issued but actually enforcing those rules on anyone outside the executive branch is a different matter. Also, you skipped over the parts of EO 2021-27505 where (a) it required declaring a (rather dubious IMHO) state of emergency, (b) the sanctions were previously authorized by Congress in the Fentanyl Sanctions Act, and (c) all the sanctions applied to "foreign persons", not citizens. There is no state of emergency, sanctions were not authorized by Congress, and you want to sanctions citizens of the United States and locally-owned businesses.
This is why purely from a "theory of governance" standpoint I find it crazy that Congress is even allowed to establish agencies in another branch that wields power reserved for them.
Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.