Except by then the cat is out of the bag and significant % of the population/institutions holds it and you can't hurt your own population without swift opposition. It's pretty clever if it works out.
The only explanation I can come up with is that institutional banking / government regulation is so stodgy that they haven't played out the decade+ repercussions.
Because after viable value is established, it's going to be a hard genie to put back in the bottle.
It's much harder to make something that appears to have value, not. Than it is to keep something that appears to not have value, not having value.
Crypto is massively profitable. Wall Street hasn't seen margins like these in a long time. There aren't clear and present harms accruing to the electorate. That leaves no incentive, in countries without capital controls, to bother with it.
1) Most people on Coinbase are speculators, and...
2) Coinbase follows government regulation
...so it's not really much of a step towards "[having] a real impact on the ability to collect taxes and control money transfers."
I think Coinbase (and Robinhood) offer pretty good avenues towards...
> And increased regulation can simply kill it by inches so there's no sudden cliff to drop off of that gets people too upset.
...by doing something like blocking bank transfers/credit card transactions to offshore exchanges and blocking cryptocurrency transfers to random addresses by most users from Coinbase/Robinhood. That would kneecap the ability to use cryptocurrency to bypass government regulations but still allow the average Joe to speculate.
Also, I'm not suggesting that this should happen, I'm just saying that it would be pretty easy to throw a wrench into the crypto machine.