Breaking down the 7 myths of Bitcoin #2

2 min readJan 18, 2021

Bitcoin may be prohibited

Does Bitcoin work like money?

If the answer is no, governments have nothing to prohibit. If the answer is yes, then governments will try to ban Bitcoin.

So the anchor point of this line of criticism assumes that Bitcoin is functional like money.

What is money? What are the properties that make a particular medium a better or worse form of money?

By design Bitcoin exists beyond governments. But Bitcoin is not only beyond the control of governments, it functions without the coordination of any central third party. It is global and decentralised.

Anyone can access Bitcoin without permission, and the more widespread its use becomes, the more difficult it becomes to censor the network.

Governments could not successfully ban alcohol consumption, drug use, the purchase of firearms or the possession of gold.

A government can marginally restrict access, or even make possession illegal, but it cannot make something of value demanded by a large and disparate group of people magically disappear.

The act of banning bitcoin would require preventing open source software from running and preventing digital signatures (created by cryptographic keys) from being disseminated on the Internet.

It would have to be coordinated between many international jurisdictions, and there is no way of knowing where the keys actually reside or of preventing more nodes from appearing in different places.

Constitutional issues aside, it would be technically unfeasible to enforce a ban on Bitcoin in any meaningful way.

Bitcoin cannot be banned.

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Breaking down the other myths:

Breaking down the 7 myths of Bitcoin #7

Breaking down the 7 myths of Bitcoin #6

Breaking down the 7 myths of Bitcoin #5

Breaking down the 7 myths of Bitcoin #4

Breaking down the 7 myths of Bitcoin #3

Breaking down the 7 myths of Bitcoin #1

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