I have great respect for Martin Armstrong's work.
However, when it comes to the topic of Bitcoin, he seem to be a little too pessimistic, saying the government can shut it down anytime it wants.
I wrote him an email asking who he would think the government could do this, but received no reply until today.
Anyone with more info?
He says very little about Bitcoin, but he sees the matter from a pragmatic viewpoint: crypto currencies - that allow hiding the money from the tax man - will be stopped by the government. Government will collude with the Bitcoin foundation or just simply direct them to do it and the protocol will be modified to implement features to enable more efficiently track of the money (but even in its current form BTC is a god given gift for the tax man as by definition everything is in the blockchain and traceable.) The miners will cooperate too. In case the developers and miners don't comply - which is extremely unlikely - measures will be exposed on different levels such as ISP and OS (in the case of proprietary OS like Windows and iOs) to crack down on Bitcoin. (Of course all naive libertarian attempts like Dash and zerocash that try to implement privacy will be cracked down too).
Please note, there is no reason for government to intervene at this moment in time. Bitcoin is minuscule and insignificant terms of market capitalization and volume, used by very few users (the active 1 million users are lot less than a mediocre porn site has) so the government will step in when for some reason it will be actually popular, but at the time the government will act quickly and forcefully.
MA is pessimistic of private money surviving long term, it usually appears during a crisis and withers away or ends up being taxed anyway, there's nothing new under the sun so the saying goes.
He doesn't believe bitcoin will be any different.
"The idea that Bitcoin can circumvent government currencies and taxes I just do not buy. I suspect these people are licking their chops to rush in. That is my only concern. You cannot withdraw $3,000 in cash without them freaking out. They will an underground economy exist? I seriously doubt it."
Agreed on your and trollercoaster's response. And btw, this is why I suggested to Zcash, they hedge their bets and also focus some of their efforts on the
corporate applications of zk-snarks to privacy for public block chains with an optional viewkey for the government. This is absolutely needed by corporations if they are going to use block chain technology to interopt more efficiently. Zcash is sitting on a gold mine technology if they get some clarity into their strategy. I think perhaps they should have hired me. Any way, I am off on other project/work now.
Let me add to both of your points, that the global government is also taking form but not entirely organized yet. For example, the G20 has just recently pledged to share information and work together on tax cheating. It takes a while to get all these 100+ nations to cooperate, but realize the leverage the G20 has over international banking (e.g. they threatened to shut off the Philippines' OFW remittances if the Philippines didn't comply with the wished for the USA such as ending the bank secrecy law in the Philippines) and over the internet trunk lines (undersea) and other geopolitical leverage.
The government will be able to shut down Bitcoin for the reasons AltcoinUK has explained. Bitcoin is becoming centralized and controlled by a few people. For example, the Chinese mining cartel controls 67% of the hashrate and recently did a 51% attack on Bitcoin.
I have pretty much given up on the anarchistic, ideological aspect of crypto currency. I am focused on a smarter "anarchistic" ideology of making crypto currency popular and enabling netizens to express themselves more freely. Ultimately the battle with be political so I am better off to use my technological expertise to enable more popular freedoms in decentralized social networking than to focus on some impossible dream.
I have also recently shown that no decentralized crypto currency can ever exist. Sorry there are lots of uninformed soundbite-mastery "experts" who persistently say otherwise, but they are wrong.