You can easily imagine a situation though where the government bans crypto and as a result, Bitcoin crashes irrecoverably and trades for maybe a few hundred dol

You can easily imagine a situation though where the government bans crypto and as a result, Bitcoin crashes irrecoverably and trades for maybe a few hundred dollars a coin at best. Think about it - all of the legitimate institutional money would have to divest, all of the loosely interested Coinbase users would sell because they don't want fines/jail, the only way to buy the coin would be with cash because your bank and credit card would report any BTC purchases to the feds... It would be a much smaller and less liquid market. Bitcoin isn't going away obviously, but that doesn't mean it's worth $50k a coin in the event it's banned.