Governments cannot ban crypto. They may ban exchanges, but if crypto ever establishes a value of its own as a currency, the government cannot do anything. At least not without basically turning off the internet. Which is, well, not out of the question for Erdogan as he is a dictator.

They can put people in jail for using crypto, which is a strong enough deterrent that 99% of people won't do it.

Yeah because it worked so well for piracy. /s

This sarcastic and snarky view is a bit shortsighted, isn’t it? Piracy worked because it was decentralized distribution. If the government goes after the gatekeepers in the same way they went after piracy they’re not just shutting down distribution - they’re taking the asset too. When someone takes over a coinbase or a binance they’re taking the coins.

Not your keys, not your coins. Your response now will, of course, be “well that’s why you rotate your coins out into cold storage” which is sort of like me saying “you just convert your lira to dollars at the end of the day when you’re done buying food and water.”

It's a good comparison but the value here is orders of magnitude off. A pirate might download a few hundreds of dollars' worth of music and movies. Crypto can be millions of dollars in a transaction. Government goes after the whales, the whole ecosystem dies.

How are you ever going to buy anything physical item ever other than "subscriptions" with crypto, if they ban it? Afaik govts are having tough time with Online Piracy but not Shipping piracy.

They can treat it as malware - blackhole all IPs involved into P2P.