Recently, US Treasury Department has put sanctions[1] on Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash, taken down their website[2], added all associated with the mixer addresses to the OFAC SDN list, and also, which is more important for this topic, compelled Microsoft to suspend Tornado Cash's Github account[3], all repositories and accounts of code maintainers[4]. It is important to emphasize that Tornado cash is not a company but a smart contract that no particular person controls; it is essentially as censorship-resistant and decentralized as the underlying blockchain upon which it is built. In other words, it cannot be "banned" easily.

So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin? What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos? What if they ban all contributors, maintainers, and lead developers? Is there a place where the bitcoin codebase can migrate to? Are there other code hosting platforms besides Github that are not based in the US or upon which US Government sanctions have little to no influence?


[1] https://www.coincenter.org/u-s-treasury-sanction-of-privacy-tools-places-sweeping-restrictions-on-all-americans/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220808144431/https://tornado.cash/
[3] https://github.com/tornadocash
[4] https://nitter.net/semenov_roman_/status/1556717890308653059