It was never a product of the underground — from the initial launch of Bitcoin it was a public project with a strong political vision. Some people tried to use it for underground activities but the claim was that those could be done anonymously on the public network, which is trivially blocked.

If punishments for being discovered were severe enough, I think we could pretty much kill it off.

Would you risk life in prison?

that's an escalation - I would risk my life to fight against a state that threatens life in prison to control something like crypto

I feel like people sometimes say things like that, but it always ends up sounding naive.

The state has tanks and drones that rain death and destruction from the sky. What could the crypto people possibly do to counter that?

How did all those tanks and drones work out for us in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or all of the other places where insurgents tend to win out over slow and bureaucratic militaries.

That was a foreign occupation, very different. The US didn't have popular support in either of those and was seen as the invader.

It would be very different if some crypto fanatics started an insurgency over wanting to have their computer money. I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.

> That was a foreign occupation, very different.

Do you think a domestic occupation would somehow go better?

> I definitely would side with the state over them and I have a feeling most folks would.

In order for a cryptocurrency ban to actually have any real effect on the actual crypto fanatics (i.e. the ones who would be willing to take up arms to defend cryptocurrency), the US would have to pull some very draconian online censorship measures that would absolutely peeve the average American. Short of that, it would be comparable to the US' existing "ban" (via the DMCA) of digital piracy: pretty much ineffective, without pirates needing to take up arms as outright insurgents to defend it.

crypto fanatics are still just civilians operating a network, the state can and should regulate by setting policy (eg by making it not so lucrative to waste electricity mining crypto that it threatens the environment)

Are you seriously saying that you would be ok with using the army to violently murder civilians because they use some computers that you think use too much energy and don't provide enough value?

It sounds like you want to take the War on Drugs textbook, and apply it to crypto. I expect it'll work about as well, and have similar collateral damage.

Often the difference between having money and having no money is life or death. So it's common for people to risk life in prison, or even death, as an alternative to having all their possessions confiscated; and that's what Bitcoin is in many cases.