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].
And yet CoinJoin projects on GitHub like
Wasabi are never shut down. Hmmm. LOL.
So, the question that bothers me is could the same happen to Bitcoin?
Yes.
What will happen to Bitcoin if the US Government suddenly decides to take down its Github repos?
The source code would start being shared on another website. Some issues or PRs may be lost in some projects that don't have a backup (can you even backup PRs or issues from GitHub?).
What if they ban all contributors, maintainers, and lead developers?
They can't ban "all" of them since a lot of Bitcoin developers don't even live in US or in US jurisdiction.
Is there a place where the bitcoin codebase can migrate to?
I don't think developers are going to migrate just because of this!
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? Is it possible to build a decentralized and distributed code hosting platform that no one can censor or shut off?
There was a topic about this a while ago when GitHub restricted a lot of accounts:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5169284.0