This belief that governments couldn't simply eg tax crypto gains at 100% or otherwise ban exchanges is just a fairy tale.

I mean, there's nothing physically stopping someone driving on the wrong side of the road but laws punish people who do.

This is just engineers believing the world runs on technical possibilities not legal consensus.

Then why are criminal enterprises still running relatively freely across the world?

Come on, you can think of a better straw man than that.

It's pretty relevant here considering XMR was pretty much blacklisted from exchanges and majority of it's activity is criminal in nature. Yet here it is with millions of market cap being completely unbothered by any kind of regulatory changes.

Bitcoin can continue operating with very little amount of people, it will obviously lose all relevance, but we're talking about fundamentals here.

Fundamentaly it should not loose its core values to still count as being here.

Otherwise some bytes of my website are potentially stored on some tapes in a mountain.