> 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...