[baddox]

You could say the same thing about copyright infringement. The governments, with all their guns, still lost that battle, despite very real and high profile lawsuits and crackdowns. When something is extremely easy and completely ubiquitous, it becomes very difficult for government to scale its enforcement. You could say the same thing of something offline, like marijuana in the US (although with that one I would argue that there is no sincere desire on the federal level to eliminate marijuana or even reduce marijuana access and use).

[hackinthebochs]

The problem is that the stuff of copyright infringement is purely virtual. For a currency to be useful it must be exchangeable for physical goods. And this physical commerce creates the endoints that allow governments to exert its influence even in the face of a distributed currency. The battle control of the monetary supply will not be a parallel.