The U.S. government is certainly not going to ban Bitcoin anytime soon. Bitcoin will be regulated and taxed in the U.S., but not banned. A country that bans Bitcoin is like a country that bans the Internet. It will lose its best and brightest and wealthiest, who will move to a more friendly jurisdiction.-A Beginner's Guide To Bitcoin
If you were to say that the U.S. government was going to ban the Internet, what would you think?
That is the same as banning Bitcoin.
Even if you fire-walled off the U.S. from the Internet, citizens will use already available ways of bypassing it just like many do in China today. (VPN, TOR, etc.)
And then, people will start to flee the country and move to jurisdictions where they can use the Internet.
It would be the fastest way to have the American public leave American soil.
You can't turn the Internet off unless you were able to destroy every computer on the planet or the entire power grid of humanity. You'd also have to kill all the humans because any temporary outage will be repaired and back online in no time.
Bitcoin is exactly the same.
Bitcoin is Mobile and untouchable if stored properly.
The War on Drugs
Consider if America's War on Drugs has been successful?
Has the government curbed drug use or distribution whatsoever?
Nope.
The drug trade is thriving.
And the result is countless lost lives over something that the government shouldn't even have a say in the first place—what people do with their bodies.
Instead, over a trillion dollars has been spent and countless lives and families destroyed with absolutely nothing positive to show for it.
The addicts that want drugs can find them. And the sellers always have a market.
Now consider how successful you think the government could be at preventing the transmission of bits over the Internet that moves at the speed of light.
It's lubricious when you think about it.
From A Beginner's Guide To Bitcoin Paperback :
As we mentioned before, you can take your Bitcoin anywhere in the world that you want, using nothing more than a "brain wallet." If the U.S. eventually bans Bitcoin, there will be a friendly country somewhere (Cayman? Singapore?) that will do everything that it can to attract those displaced Bitcoiners. What country doesn't want wealthy and educated immigrants?
The Bitcoin software is currently being run on more than 11,000 computers around the world: https://bitnodes.io/ A government can try to shut down all of the full nodes inside of its border, but how can it shut down the full nodes that are operating in another country?
If the U.S. decides to ban Bitcoin, it can try to shut down all full nodes in the U.S. But the Bitcoin network will keep running in other countries. China and Russia might just decide that they don't want to go along with the U.S. and ban Bitcoin.
A lot of other countries resent the "exorbitant privilege" conveyed by U.S. Dollars and would like to see this system come to an end. Even if it wanted to, the U.S. could never shut down all of the full nodes, even within its borders.
How do you seize all of the computers that are running an open-source software program?
Open-source software is currently protected under the First Amendment in the U.S. If you do try to shut down people running the software, someone can just fire up a new computer, download the Bitcoin software, and get up and running again.
Bitcoin is more difficult to stop than cannabis or alcohol, both of which the U.S. government tried and failed to shut down.
Let's not forget the fact that billionaires and Wall Street also love Bitcoin now, and they have the lobbying power to protect it.
The billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya already owns 1 million Bitcoin. Other billionaires like the Winklevoss twins have been scooping up Bitcoin and stashing it away in cold storage. Like all good money, Bitcoin is being hoarded and taken out of circulation.
This process has accelerated in 2020, with the entrance of institutional investors into the game. Famous hedge fund managers like Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller have been buying Bitcoin.
The billionaire Michael Saylor bought 17,732 Bitcoins for himself and another 40,824 Bitcoins for his publicly-traded company (MicroStrategy). Anyone who tells you that Bitcoin is going to be banned in the U.S. has simply not been paying attention.
Good luck getting legislators to ban something that U.S. billionaires and Wall Street love.
Why would regulators allow U.S. banks to custody Bitcoin (as they did in 2020), if they were planning on making Bitcoin illegal?