[JSZZHlmumeUE]

Like, when the internet got huge, moral question of whether people should be exposed to "evil books" or not becomes irrelevant. If one wants to read a book you think is not appropriate, he will do so anyway.

That's certainly an interesting perspective but it makes certain assumptions about what bitcoin will be used for that I'm not sure I agree with.

Governments printing ASICs to spam the network... That's the most expensive way to attack Bitcoin.

Not really, somebody estimated that getting ASICs to control 51% of the network would cost only a few hundred million dollars, which isn't much at all from a governmental point of view.

Also, as far semiconductor manufacturing goes - pretty much all of it is the non-recurring engineering cost of designing the IC. The actual cost of printing it on Si is a very small fraction for large volume chips.

Governments would love to extract that BTC for their spendings instead of killing it.

Governments than can print fiat currency don't really have a problem financing their spending. They do have a problem with currencies that undermine fiat currencies.

[cdash]

To be honest they don't even have to actually do it, if they so much as just announced that they were going to do it is probably enough to cause a panic sell utterly destroying any chance bitcoin has because so many people would be burned.

[dllthomas]

I wonder if that announcement would lead to more or less mining going on. If less, the announcement would mean the attack itself gets cheaper.