Bitcoin is an elemental force, like fire or the discovery of the wheel, that you can’t UNINVENT because you’d have to quite literally destroy all of humanity and go back to the Stone Age.
This is why I cringe each time I see people talking about the US government “banning” Bitcoin.
They can no more “ban” Bitcoin than they can ban the Bible.
The only thing a government can do is make it harder to buy bitcoin from the incumbent financial system.
They could outlaw it, but it would be impossible to enforce or actually track who has it. (There are already ways to get around this today, imagine if the market needed it for millions of people.)
If governments try to control it through any means, the network will respond and become stronger — the definition of antifragility.
Bitcoin, the Internet, and truly free markets are ANTIFRAGILE — they get stronger the more you attack them.
Cut down one head, two or 100 grow back.
Over time society will view Bitcoin as an elemental force akin to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire.
The idea of regulating or banning, or outlawing Bitcoin will be as asinine as suggesting we do the same to the wheel.
The Bible is a good example, the most printed book in history.
What would happen if you banned the Bible?
The opposite: they’d make it more valuable and more widely disseminated.
The net effect would be millions of tech nerds selling encrypted zip drives holding a digital copy.
People that would want it would get it behind closed doors, not to mention the fact that they could just buy one from any of the hundreds of other countries that haven’t banned it.
What about the Internet?
You could publish a copy of the Bible for free from anywhere in the world while remaining anonymous and users in a banned country could access it.
So then the government makes those websites illegal?
How exactly?
It would require getting rid of the constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The further you unravel this idea, the more absurd it becomes.
The only way to completely erase the Bible (and Bitcoin) would be to kill every human on the planet and blow up every computer.
That is the ONLY way.
This means that through decentralization, both Bitcoin and the Bible are antifragile — they gain the more you attack them.
If you ban something in one country, you make it more valuable in another.
This is how the free market works. And it’s the best way to give prosperity and sovereignty to all humans — by letting free markets do their thing.
In Bitcoin’s case, there have to be at least a few intelligent people in the government (or at least some contractors they can hire) that will explain what Bitcoin actually is so they can map out war games like simulations. (They’re already doing/done this.)
The inevitable conclusion they will keep coming to no matter how many simulations they run is this: we can’t do it!
So if the government can’t effectively outlaw something, what is their next best action?
Embrace it and tax it.
They’ve finally started to figure this out with marijuana, which brings me to my last example — The War on Drugs.
Are drugs more prevalent or less now that the War of Drugs has been raging on for 20+ years?
They recently nabbed El Chapo, the modern-day Pablo Escobar. Has the drug trade in Mexico gone away?
Hardly. It’s probably now stronger.
The drug trade is an example of an antifragile economy — attack it, and it gets stronger.
It’s the classic case of whack-a-mole.
The idea that you can end it with more spending or law enforcement or regulation is laughable.
But we shouldn’t be surprised, considering most government intervention makes things worse.
We these problems because we falsely believe we can control, manage, and fix complex systems.
Egotistical and vote-seeking politicians dupe voters with flowery narratives and other nonsense.
Then what politicians do or don’t do has little repercussions. While in office, they gain money and power regardless of how effective their policies are.
It’s a joke.
In every literal sense of the word. A complete reality TV clown show.
And people have been so duped by the charade that their entire worldview is predicated on fitting things into this broken system that they can’t even fathom that humans created something that could circumvent something else made by humans — government.
The free market will decide because, for the first time in history, we have a truly free market form of wealth storage called Bitcoin.
And this is why Bitcoin is going to bring more power and sovereignty to more humans than anything in history.
All governments can do—will do—is sit and watch.