Here is the latest installment of Mr. Parker Lewis’ incredible series of blog posts, Gradually, Then Suddenly. Herein he dives into the catchall dismissal heaved around by skeptical precoiners, status-quo shills, and antagonistic nocoiners that “The government will ban it soon.” I love this article from the very first line:
The idea that somehow bitcoin can be banned by governments is the final stage of grief, right before acceptance.
Yes, this uninformed opinion is a tacit agreement not just that Bitcoin works, but that it works so well that it is a threat to status-quo institutions and government and hence needs to be banned.
Beyond that, this dismissal of Bitcoin ignores the fact that it was designed precisely to be resistant to heavy-handed attacks from state actors. Bitcoin is Antifragile. It is a distributed system designed precisely to continue to exist and function in the face of coordinated attacks or something much worse, even along the lines of a cataclysmic event.
[Bitcoin] can’t be changed. It can’t be argued with. It can’t be tampered with. It can’t be corrupted. It can’t be stopped.It can’t even be interrupted. If nuclear war destroyed half of our planet, it would continue to live, uncorrupted. It would continue to offer its services. It would continue to pay people to keep it alive. The only way to shut it down is to kill every server that hosts it. Which is hard, because a lot of servers host it, in a lot of countries, and a lot of people want to use it.
Ralph Merkle, Computer Scientist and pioneer in Cryptography
Once you grasp that it cannot be ‘banned’ any more than the government can ban guns, drugs, BitTorrent, etc, etc, etc (not to mention that prohibition causes the supply of a good to fall and therefore price to rise)… you realize that Bitcoin will continue to exist. The best they could do is make it inconvenient to transact with, particularly via fiat on and off ramps. This has the perverse side effects of accelerating the creation of circular Bitcoin economies in which goods and services are denominated in bitcoin, users transact via bitcoin, and never exchange bitcoin back to fiat, as well as forcing massive capital flight to jurisdictions that treat Bitcoin favorably. Governments are damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Bitcoin is a strange game where the only winning move is to play.
Michael Goldstein
Once you realize Bitcoin cannot be banned, and will continue to exist, function, and provide benefits to its users, then you must evaluate it based on its monetary properties, which are strictly superior to status-quo fiat moneys. Yes, it’s all going to come down to economic reality and the fact that Bitcoin is the hardest, soundest money the world has ever known — something the world is in dire need of at this critical junction in human history.