> It's trivial to make it illegal to operate a full node Right, making something illegal is trivial. But how would you effectively stop someone from doing it?

> It's trivial to make it illegal to operate a full node Right, making something illegal is trivial. But how would you effectively stop someone from doing it? You can tunnel the traffic as with anything. They'd have to go full China to stop it. And you don't need to run a full node if you're willing to trust a consensus of miners about the current state. (You can see how much work a block (probably) took to mine, so if someone shows you a block with the wrong proof-of-work target you know they're lying, meaning that even this forgery to show to an offline user is 51%-attack level hard.) > if the government bars exchanges from operating legally, how do you actually trade bitcoin for anything? Have you ever travelled and bought currency privately? Either just because you ran out, or the listed exchange rate is fixed. You meet someone in a bar and hand them an envelope of cash. If you used something like the OpenDime offline wallet then it would be easier. They'd transfer to the offline wallet which you would verify, and then you'd do a regular handover of physical items, cash for hardware wallet. Sure, it's a bit shady, and maybe horribly illegal, but if you were trying to get out of the country with your family's wealth all of a sudden it'd seem pretty easy compared to the alternatives.