> There is no easy way to stop the Bitcoin network so if they really wanted to kill Bitcoin they would make it illegal to exchange Bitcoin. But then people woul

> There is no easy way to stop the Bitcoin network so if they really wanted to kill Bitcoin they would make it illegal to exchange Bitcoin. But then people would exchange it and just not report it anywhere, and they’d lose tax revenue. But that would be good enough to kill it for almost all purposes. Unlike illicit drugs, there's very little natural demand for Bitcoin to motivate people to risk it if it were illegal, which cuts it off from deriving value from the legit economy. It's also not very stealthy, so it would not be very desirable for the illicit economy, either [1]. A network that only has die-hard ideological cryptocurrency dead-enders on it is dead for all practical purposes. [1] Right now, it has some marginal use at the interface between the legit and illicit economies (e.g. dark net markets), but if it itself became illicit, I think that would stop.