Well to start with, building up a really huge mining operation is expensive - there's electricity costs, maintenance costs, leasing costs and of course you have to buy the actual equipment, and the total expenses will usually run into 6 figures a month for a large operation. Sure, they can just fund it with taxpayer money, but starve out their other funding projects? Most likely there will be disagreement between indivitual gubmint staff about that.

One of the advantages that the common person has related to some item the govt. wants to ban is that hardly anyone inside the government can agree with each other on *how* exactly to ban it - the result is a lack of consensus which then drowns in the water because as it turns out, their superiors are not interested in this endeavor.


On the technical side of things why this is not very feasible, is twofold.

First, it's freaking expensive to run your own mining operation as I've explained above (besides, the utilities and building owners and maintenance crews also need to get paid).

The second option would be to simply coerce some other mining group to do the dirty work for them. [This is exactly what they Marathon Group was doing when it tried to censor BTC addresses - but that movement largely failed to user outrage]. This presents two problems:

i) Miner is located in another country. In that case, good luck convincing the other gubmint to cooperate with you.
ii) They'd need to coerce many mining groups because no single mining pool has a majority hashrate. We are talking e.g. 5 different pools. The possibility of these pools colluding with each other is extremely low. In fact, it is lowered further for each additional pool that joins the conspiracy.


Wait, so Western Union is still a thing over there