Nick Szabo  🔑

Between 1933 and 1975, the U.S. government was successful (mostly) in restricting gold bullion ownership. Why couldn't they simply make Bitcoin illegal to own the same way?

Gold is far less securely storable and transportable than properly managed Bitcoin. Long before FDR, the Spanish were looting the Aztecs, English pirates were looting the Spanish, and so on.

ok lemme ask you this: are you factoring in any of your own biases? like most people, i'm favorite-longshot bias...i want the underdog to win. and btc is the underdog. but i recognize that bias and factor it in.

The technologically superior solution, in this case to secure storage, transport, and transfer of wealth, is hardly the underdog.

the technology is no doubt superior in a lot of ways. and i really do believe that governments will eventually use distributed ledger tech for their own currencies. but i seriously doubt they're gonna give up control of monetary policy to the public.

Short of cutting off electricity, governments will have not way of truly stopping bitcoin. Additionally destroying all records of the blockchain is, at this point, impossible. Bitcoin forgot to ask the worlds permission, and now it doesn't need it.

you're right, they'll never stop it completely. but they can restrict it well enough. they can't completely stop heroin or child porn either. just look at the penalty for Executive Order 6102: $10,000 fine and/or up 10 years imprisonment. now consider it was written in 1933...

inflation-adjusted, that's nearly a $200,000 penalty today...oh and up to 10 years in prison...for owning a piece of metal that threatened the Fed's monetary policy... this is how important control of monetary policy is...all they have to do is legislate & pressure ISP to conform