[Lawtonfogle]

>If they couldn't stop movie piracy, how are they supposed to stop free global financial services?

They could hit it really hard. They haven't stopped illegal images from being spread, but they have made it really rare except for the darkest corners of the web.

[jasonisalive]

If by illegal images you mean child pornography, there's a few key differences between CP and Bitcoin. Namely: very very few people are into CP, while practically everyone who isn't an enthusiast is violently opposed to it. Therefore, law enforcement has a practical free reign to track down and destroy the lives of CP-sharers, and are actively supported and even acclaimed by the wider public for their actions.

The excuses for the prohibition of free financial services on the other hand are all basically covert attempts to protect the sovereignty of state military/police institutions, and do not actually align at all with the interests of regular folk. Plus absolutely everybody needs and enjoys high quality, unrestricted financial services.

So I see the chances of government attempts to suppress Bitcoin succeeding as more or less 0. What would be the grounds for it? Where would they gather the support that would allow them to openly violently suppress great swathes of people to try and keep it from happening?

It's even less likely to succeed than efforts to suppress copyright-breaking, because with Bitcoin there are no legitimate victims, it is only the state who will lose out.

[Lawtonfogle]

I don't think it is so simple.

In the past it was legal to produce and distribute it. Most people didn't care enough to stop it. In a relatively short time certain groups turned it from a 'meh, not my problem' to 'kill it with fire, nukes, lasers, and anything else we can throw at it'. They could potentially do the same to bitcoins. (You can even find there was a period where most all child abuse wasn't considered a problem, with one of the key cases of the era being a case where the lawyers for one abused child argued that the child should be legally considered an animal because at that time animals had greater protection). And the numbers of individuals into it are larger that most people realize (consider that 1 in 5 children are sexually abused by the time they reach 18 to know just how large the problem is).

Now, maybe certain factors like the potential demand growing for bitcoins would be enough to keep it from being banned. Also, even if you could get the public worked up about the topic, it is much harder to shock and awe them. What would a pro-ban advocacy group do, show numbers of wallets? And the ability for the government to scare people has taken a hit thanks to the backlash from the war on drugs.