Bitcoin as a virus can be easily controlled (no need to kill it for as long as government can regulate, tax, and confiscate it) as I explained in the prior post about regulating the mining pools. The people can't stand up and fight if their weapon is fundamentally impotent, regardless of how many people adopt it.
For those who say the government can't confiscate your private keys, my prior post says that it is irrelevant. They can block you from transacting, so then your private key is useless.
History is full of examples where common citizens ignored ridiculous laws until they went away. Alcohol prohibition in the 1920s didn't stop people from drinking. Doctors prescribed alcohol as medication. Private drinking clubs proliferated. Police were easily bribed because they didn't believe in that law. Slavery laws were often disregarded in favor of human decency. Traffic laws are routinely ignored.
(erroneously equating two orthogonal categories). Please refer to my reply to him, wherein I pointed out that the government can not centralize actions (e.g. growing marijuana) people can do independently.
Whereas, money is inherently a centralized concept, because we all need a ledger that we can agree is the record of who paid what to whom. Thus
individuals can't ignore government regulations acting independently with their Bitcoin if the authorities can find the mining pools (and thus the government can regulate the mining pools, i.e. the servers control which transactions are put on the block chain).
The only way you can stop the government from having this power, is to hide the mining pools so the government can't find them (the servers).
The thing about Bitcoin is that there is no moral reason to ban it. In fact, it's just the opposite. Cash is used for violent crimes because it is untraceable and anonymous. Since paper money technology isn't banned, there is no worry that Bitcoin will be outlawed.
1. How many times do I have to repeat that
the government doesn't need to ban Bitcoin, as long as they can regulate it, tax, and confiscate their desired portion of the wealth (which is the what governments are always doing, nothing out-of-the-ordinary here). When I write "government can block your transaction by regulating the mining pools", I mean if you are not cooperating with the going to be very high confiscation (ahem I mean "tax") rates. Most of the people will cooperate and comply with government regulation (many of them are receiving government aid any way). It is the
people who have wealth that have to worry, i.e. if you are in "the 1%". The masses ("the 99%") are hunky-dory with government regulation.
Click here to see if you are in the 1%.
2. Government has a huge moral obligation to regulate Bitcoin to protect the public from fraud, theft, and tax evasion. And please realize the government is bankrupt and has an obligation to the public (e.g. unfunded promised future liabilities of the USA government to its constituents is $150+ trillion), so they will be increasing the portion of the wealth they confiscate each year. Governments will confiscate (ahem "tax") increasingly larger share of the GDP every year for next next couple of decades, because the global debt is $158+ trillion and the debt-to-GDP ratios are greater than 200% in every western nation on earth.