Or for anyone who thinks Bitcoin is dumb etc..
That's fine, think what you want.
But..
If it gets more and more popular, and people find that they like using it-- promise you won't ask your government to plz make it illegal?
Lol.
I remember one year in fantasy hockey.
I didn't draft any defensemen. Instead, I figured I would do what's known as "streaming", where I add/drop based on whoever has an IRL game that day. 🤷
I'm a visionary. Vision is scary.
There were a couple who thought both (a) that I was a dummy and when I won (b) that it happened unfairly.
Now, part (b) we'd later learn is a character flaw in its own right. There essentially isn't a game anymore if how we subjectively feel about moves starts to matter. So the sporting and honorable thing is that people can play as they'd like within the rules, even if optimal strategy turns out to surprise you.
But you really can't have both.
You can't laugh about how bad I'm playing and how I must not understand fantasy hockey, and then whine that I have a cheat code after I win.
Because if it's a cheat code that obviously would work but you're just going by some unspoken agreement in your mind, or something like that, then you wouldn't have laughed about how bad I'm playing. You would have been like "oh, he's doing the cheat code, he doesn't know about the unspoken agreement".
Can't have both.
(The cheat code is that I realized it would work and you thought it wouldn't.)
This is by no means a perfect metaphor.
But still, as Bitcoin continues to grow, please just take the L.
Lol.
Giving up your ban hammer now puts a little skin in the game.
Bitcoin won't be banned though.
In general prohibiting things isn't something governments can just "do", really.
They create incentives that curb the amount of behavior and how it happens, but don't actually stop the thing from existing.
So if the idea is governments will ban Bitcoin because people using it indicates a threat to fiat.. well, Bitcoin still exists and shining a light on it and also making people wonder why you're banning it might not really work that well. People can always demand different laws as they come to different understandings.
I don't actually even think it's interpreted as a threat though. (Keynesians will laugh, like "well ya, because it's an awful currency.. no one controls it"). But within my confines of seeing it as the next paradigm, I also don't think anyone is threatened by it..
If your ship is sinking you're happy there's a raft.
Even though conceptually it's a threat to fiat, people within the fiat paradigm don't really operate under a "fiat vs all its threats" motivation. They'll have their various assortments of self-interest, and to some extent it's tethered to maintaining the current system, but people act on their particular interest and it can involve hedging and being ready for a new paradigm too.
Most likely they'll just work with it. Maybe they'll have their own systems that whitelist coins, and the coins you declare and link to your identity are considered legal tender. Maybe at first they'll back fiat by an amount of btc.
(People of 2072: Don't believe them.)
But the big thing is there's not one monolithic government.
At least I hope there isn't. We don't really know how much collusion there is. But assuming it generally works as we expect, with only the known alliances, then there are multiple different interests.
And if you put the "Bitcoin is stupid" or whatever preconception aside and take it as the thought experiment of "good thing that people are wanting to use" (and really it might be more like "the backbone of global commerce is galvanizing")..
Then the leaders of a country generally just shoot themselves in the foot by denying their citizens access to it. And the other countries should often embrace it to take the leg up.
While it's unfortunate that we have fundamentally coercive governments, it's probably good that they have each other to contend with, lol.
With us, it's more like they're having a careful dance rather than a drag thru the mud.
Ultimately, if something is trying to be a major game-changer for humanity, a few people won't write down some rules to change it.
I still ask you not to though. It's for your own honor. If you say it's awful, you have to let it be and not try to ban it when it looks less awful 🤷
You don't get to do both.