>(Government regulations cannot kill it; they can only drive it underground, as with gold.) >Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how an

>(Government regulations cannot kill it; they can only drive it underground, as with gold.) >Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its network would stop functioning. This can be done pretty easily, once enough countries ban and condemn it for its contribution to the climate crisis and to crime. There's no need to catch every transaction, just to ban it enough to shrink the mining pool. Once the active network has shrunk enough, the transparent permissionless structure ensures we can ran the obvious attacks on it. Since it's now underground and these actors aren't the nicest of people, coordinating the forks to resist the attacks will be difficult and costly. People give up after each attack, which makes running another attack easier and so on. Eventually maintaining the network as is won't be worth it to anyone.