Shutting down Bitcoin would be a simply matter of throwing some money at the problem. Shutting down Citibank would require a legal fight.
A legal fight is a matter of legislation. Should the laws shift within a nation, it becomes easier to shut them down, contrary to Bitcoin, which adheres to the immutable laws of mathematics and physics. Regardless of its legal status in any given country, Bitcoin persists as a force that requires billions of dollars to suppress.
What "immutable laws of math and physics" is stopping the CCP from ordering some of its people to take over the hashrate of Bitcoin and thus take control of it? That's all it would take to annihilate Bitcoin and every block it stores.
As I said above, Bitcoin is, as a whole, probably easier to attack than a large American bank.
I believe the comparison to an American bank is flawed. Unlike a bank, which readily shares identifiable information with the government upon request, you operate as a company issuing custom currencies. If these currencies facilitate anonymous transactions beyond your tracking capabilities, you're essentially conducting operations beyond the government's oversight. Eventually, you'll be viewed as enemy to them, and if that happens... bye-bye Haypenny.
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Correct. Haypenny is analogous to a cryptocurrency in this regard since we merely supply the transaction mechanism and we don't take in US dollars etc.
And we offer the government tracking of transactions from point A to point B, similar (and probably much more precisely) than what you'd get using chain analysis on Bitcoin. If the government wanted to track a transactions, there would be two end points we would supply them and then they would subpoena those endpoints and have their suspect.
Overall, using Haypenny to do a crime would be about as smart as using GMail to discuss a crime with your fellow criminals with pseudonyms. Maybe some are stupid enough to use GMail like that, but they'd be caught pretty quick. (And Haypenny also tracks IPs and VPN companies are in the same boat we are in e.g. they can be subpoenaed to find the real IPs etc. so again, criminals would be really stupid to try to use Haypenny to do crime).
Right now there's a heated debate about miners needing to pay an extra tax in another thread here. Who are these miners? Oh that's right, they are
readily identifiable individuals. If the government could target
them they could target any blockchain network. I think we're talking about relative doomsday scenarios--governments aren't going to shut down either of us--but ultimately there's nothing especially "government-proof" about Bitcoin or any human invention. Fighting governments will always be a losing proposition no matter what--the only way to keep yourself safe is to
vote (and support democracies over dictatorships).