Legal tender is perhaps the most important corner stone of a modern nation state, if an entrepreneur can invent their own money and subsume the one issued by a government then you don't have a government. I for one prefer having a government.

This is not a trivial issue as cryptocurrency proponents seem to think it is.

Nonsense. We've had non-political money before. During the free banking era we had thousands of bank-issued currencies that competed in an open market, and the state was alive and well.

The state exists as long as it has a monopoly on force within its jurisdiction. It doesn't need to monopolize the control of money and imprison anyone who has wrong-think about what they consider to be money.

I understand that a lot of people here don't like cryptocurrency and the get-rich mentality around it, but understand that when you call for laws to prohibit various uses of it, you're calling for people to see the inside of a prison cell because they have different ideas about what money is than you.

Legal-tender laws already prevent non-government currencies from subsuming fiat. Nobody is obliged to accept Bitcoin as payment of a debt, but they are obliged to accept legal tender.

And besides that, there will always be demand for fiat at least for paying taxes.

I don't agree having a non government issued currency means you don't have a government, for one there seem to be a few countries that use the Dollar or Euro as the de-facto currency.

It's radically different from allowing your defacto currency to be one managed by another country, particuarly one that has no common economic interest with yours.

Having alternative currencies doesn't obviate all the benefits of organized representation.

It does not even replace the nation currency unless you think that the national currency is so defective that citizens will collectively choose coins.

As long as they pay (using real money!) the taxes owed on the economic transactions carried using this alternative currency, I think they will be fine.

I'm reminded of Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer":

    I am just a poor boy
    Though my story's seldom told
    I have squandered my resistance
    For a pocketful of mumbles
    Such are promises