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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

It's not hard to imagine a world where bitcoin wins and everyone uses it for everything.

Instead of a government blocking your bank account, they block your Coinbase account and all known addresses. Through financial networks, they tell every processor, exchange, and network to block your known addresses from transacting and impose heavy fines for negligent institutions.

Suddenly your "decentralized" bitcoin stops working everywhere unless you secretly stashed some under your bed. Which is the exact same situation that exists today.

The only difference is that promoting bitcoin enriches those with existing bitcoin investments.

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1) Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency. I was thinking more about Monero.

2) Coinbase wouldn't be relevant in a scenario where everyone uses Bitcoin already.

“Instead of a government blocking your bank account, they block your Coinbase account and all known addresses.”

This is only a problem because people use bitcoin to exchange cryptos for dollars ?

When more people are trading with cryptos only, the government won’t have much chance in stopping people using it for whatever they want ?

You won’t need coinbase…

That changes nothing. They will just tell the miners to block those transactions, and threaten to confiscate their equipment if they don't.

Why would the miners listen to you?

Where are the miners?

I just explained this, the miners will listen to you under threat of being shut down.

The miners will generally be located in countries where electricity is abundant and cheap, the kind of countries who have all the incentives to sign a treaty promising to jointly enforce laws against cryptocurrencies.

I mean I could ask the unicorns for a ride too.

What you want is the Jackboot of the state to punish those that will not bend to the desires of tyrants.

Thank Satoshi we have another way.

I don't want or not want that, it is simply a thing that could happen if there was enough reason for it to happen. If we're lucky it won't have to happen; cryptocurrency will simply collapse under its own weight because of the ridiculous amount of fraud and scams.

Satoshi left bitcoin in 2011. His "invention" was apparently not good enough for him to bother sticking around.

No, he left because he was worried about folks like yourself constantly trying to shut it down. But that time has past. You are void screaming.

If he was really worried about that, he should've just shut it down himself to save us all some trouble.

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