alanbwt on Nostr: “What if the government bans #Bitcoin?” No one can ban Bitcoin. All they can do ...
“What if the government bans #Bitcoin?”
No one can ban Bitcoin. All they can do is ban themselves from Bitcoin.
Case in point, China tried and failed to ban Bitcoin multiple times (in 2013, 2017, 2019, and 2021). Yet Chinese miners still account for 20% of Bitcoin’s total global hashrate.
Clearly, even the world’s most competent authoritarian government is unable to effectively ban the world’s no 1 free and open source currency. Why would the USA, or any other government, be more successful?
Moreover, China has recently taken a more lenient stance on Bitcoin by allowing retail trading in Hong Kong. They’ve realized Bitcoin isn’t going away, and so they are hedging their bets by legally allowing it to a degree.
Why, technically, can’t China or anyone succeed in banning Bitcoin? The answer is that Bitcoin requires no trusted third parties. The first words of the whitepaper describe Bitcoin as “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] allow[s] online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
Because Bitcoin does not need to go through any centralized financial institution, governments are powerless to stop it. At best, all they can do is try to track who is using Bitcoin, and go after those individuals one by one. However, with the rise of the lightning network, mixing services, and the existence of VPNs and Tor browsers and other privacy preserving technologies, this is no easy task.
Therefore, Bitcoin cannot be banned. All anyone can do is decide not to use Bitcoin themselves, which is a losing strategy.
No one can ban Bitcoin. All they can do is ban themselves from Bitcoin.
Case in point, China tried and failed to ban Bitcoin multiple times (in 2013, 2017, 2019, and 2021). Yet Chinese miners still account for 20% of Bitcoin’s total global hashrate.
Clearly, even the world’s most competent authoritarian government is unable to effectively ban the world’s no 1 free and open source currency. Why would the USA, or any other government, be more successful?
Moreover, China has recently taken a more lenient stance on Bitcoin by allowing retail trading in Hong Kong. They’ve realized Bitcoin isn’t going away, and so they are hedging their bets by legally allowing it to a degree.
Why, technically, can’t China or anyone succeed in banning Bitcoin? The answer is that Bitcoin requires no trusted third parties. The first words of the whitepaper describe Bitcoin as “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] allow[s] online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”
Because Bitcoin does not need to go through any centralized financial institution, governments are powerless to stop it. At best, all they can do is try to track who is using Bitcoin, and go after those individuals one by one. However, with the rise of the lightning network, mixing services, and the existence of VPNs and Tor browsers and other privacy preserving technologies, this is no easy task.
Therefore, Bitcoin cannot be banned. All anyone can do is decide not to use Bitcoin themselves, which is a losing strategy.