There are cryptocurrency supporters who want to revolutionize the world's monetary systems, get governments out of currency manipulation, make international transfers easy and free, remove burden of entry for businesses, remove oppressive payment processors etc.

Then there are cryptocurrency supporters who are holding large amounts of it and just want the value to keep going up.

The latter category definitely does not want a government ban on trading/usage.

> cryptocurrencies are truly decentralized and resilient to censorship

If a major government wanted to break crypto, it would simply credibly threaten to launch a 51% attack. This is within the budget of most developed economies, and much simpler than enforcing a ban. Nobody does it because it would be stupid. Crypto is part of the economy. Destroying it would be akin to bombing a domestic factory because one doesn’t like its products.

> If a major government wanted to break crypto, it would simply credibly threaten to launch a 51% attack.

Anyone who makes this argument likely stopped staying in touch with blockchain tech after 2016.

That seems to apply to a lot of discussion of crypto on HN.

It's like people stopped paying attention after the last crash and assume the crypto space has stood still since.

51% attack would be very expensive on electricity and new infrastructure. There is already working and profitable infrastructure to prevent money laundering.

> If a major government wanted to break crypto, it would simply credibly threaten to launch a 51% attack.

Do you know how hard it's now to buy/produce graphic cards and asic-s good for mining crypto? The demand is very big yet producers can't scale up. I don't see governments to have possibility obtaining so much hardware in a short/medium time horizon.

Why do you think the government would have to produce new ASICs, when they could just buy or seize the existing ones?

> Why do you think the government would have to produce new ASICs, when they could just buy or seize the existing ones?

There is not enough of them to buy on the market to make 51% attack. Of course seizing is possible but hard because I imagine it would be quite hard to locate them, apart form large mining operations they are quite distributed.

In case of bitcoin network it would have to be a large multicountry operation. Because the miners are really distributed around the world.

They could just subpoena websites and retailers that sold them previously and start there.

That would take out the "most developed countries" part...

Not agreeing, but it is interesting viewpoint. Personally I have been involved a lot in the crypto space, and seen lots of bank account freezes and similar problems happening to crypto traders. Maybe sometimes there is something nefarious going on, maybe it was false positive, who knows. However, personally seeing this has affected me in a way where I don't really trust banks much. That has put me in a position where I have increasingly large position in cryptocurrencies.

That's dumb. The purpose of decentralization isn't to simply demonstrate the strength of the decentralization. It's an element that helps something achieve a purpose. In this case, the ability of a person to be their own bank. Not being banned also helps that purpose. Why would cryptocurrency supporters lobby for government bans?

But most cryptos are not truly decentralised and robust enough. There is centralised dev team. And no crypto can truly handle brainsplit network issues.

The protocols and tech might be resistant to government crackdowns, but the user's being sent to prison for "illegal use of cryptocurrency" would certainly hamper use...

Except there's a gov't ban and now you can't actually get dollars into your brokerage account to buy crypto (and neither can anyone else), and then the price starts dropping.

There's only so much effort someone will go through until they'll just put the money in Robinhood or something and buy some random meme stock.

Obviously sarcasm, but there's a little bit of truth behind this. The real value of cryptocurrency is if the governments ban it. (They are more of a nightmare for totalitarian regimes, rather than free open societies.)

Isn't that typical of new 'things' ? Defining themselves against the norm only to reach for acceptance as proof of stability ?

> Cryptocurrency supporters should be lobbying for government bans, not against them.

Just like a banned dr. Suess book, this would further inflate prices

No Dr. Seuss books are banned. The publisher decided to stop publishing a few of them.

There's more to it than that - eBay for example has banned trade in those books as well (Amazon too, and probably others), on the second hand market. Not sure if they reversed this absolutely crazy decision in the meantime, would be happy to hear that they did.

They did not reverse it. And I can’t buy those books at Barnes & Noble, either. Even at their physical stores.

Oh no!

Anyways.