This article imagines that states are more powerful than networks. They aren't. Networks - people networks, trade networks, electronic networks - get the final

This article imagines that states are more powerful than networks. They aren't. Networks - people networks, trade networks, electronic networks - get the final say in what states do and don't enforce. It was this way with the project of free trade and markets - a gradual succumbing of monarchs to capitalists through encroachment on the legal and power structures. So too is it likely to be with crypto networks - they have to fail by disinterest, not by enforcement. The definition of what finance should or should not be is not theraputic(in the Wittgenstein sense) to the underlying goals represented by the technology, which simply records and persists a shared account of transactions. Every time you have such a system, the market will pop up around it like a weed and invent some kind of game of value exchange to play, productive or not. A ban redirects attention back towards the core functions of crypto, and can discourage it as a speculative instrument - but it doesn't make it stop existing until you remove the last node, and the cost of doing that is staggering. So it's a very safe assumption to guess that it's here to stay, whether in a public and visible role or in the shadows.