Total BS: "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments"

[pooya87]

For some reason you keep advertising the pedophile POTUS and think he is powerful. It is so strange...

With this political and financial support, they get the US Congress to pass a law declaring that this new fork is the "official Bitcoin" and every other fork is an illegal fake and cannot be called "Bitcoin".

Everyone knows how delusional and stupid the US regime is but not when it comes to propaganda. They are the best at it which means the morons are most familiar with it too.
In other words they will never make such a mistake of announcing such an attack like this. Any "centralized" coin the US regime creates will be abandoned immediately not by the world (that part is too obvious) but also by Americans and will become an immediate shitcoin.

If some day they wanted to carry out such a malicious attack, they'd do it in a much more subtle way. Making it look like their subjects have made that choice to abandon bitcoin and adopt a centralized shitcoin.

The only thing that matters is that what you are describing is domestic so the rest of the world won't care. Just like the dictators in China banned bitcoin a while ago and the world didn't care, if the dictators in the US ban bitcoin, the world won't care either. And China had a much bigger influence in the crypto market than US ever has.

The reason Bitcoin isn't currently being controlled by the US government is because they don't feel like it.

This part was very funny though
What's next? You're gonna say the only reason why shittokens and shitcoins like bcash or bcash-SV aren't taking over bitcoin is because "they don't want to" ROFL.

[Darker45]

How do you define control? In the specific scenario that you provided, in what way did the US government control Bitcoin? The number of users isn't Bitcoin. The price of BTC isn't Bitcoin. The level of support, whether retail or institutional, isn't Bitcoin.

Correct: The $1 trillion+ in tradable value is Bitcoin.

Imagine somebody whose life savings is in BTC: all they are going to care about is that their investment is safe.

For almost all holders of BTC, Bitcoin is an investment. The value of that investment is based on a market price. Any entity that can massively control that market price--which the US government absolutely can do--can control almost all holders of BTC's actions insofar as they care about their money.

If you want to debate what the 0.00002% of humans who don't care about money would do, be my guest  .

I myself care about the value of my life savings that's into Bitcoin, but I don't think everybody, except 0.00002% of them, would leave Bitcoin if your scenario becomes real. I don't think Bitcoin's decentralization has no value today.

Bitcoin might fall in the short term if the US government sides with the fork, but it will soon recover. The one that's manipulated by the government is always the less trusted.

In the end, the Bitcoin that's made way less popular remained as it is, uncontrolled, decentralized, borderless, seizure-proof, censorship-resistant, and so on.

Sure, and Coca Cola started off as cold medicine. Strategy used to be a software company that did web log analysis.

Things evolved into something entirely different sometimes. Bitcoin has already changed a lot since it started, and can change a lot more. (And it's actually none of those things you mentioned anymore, really, except for "borderless").

As far as I know, anybody who self-custodies Bitcoin can still send Sats to anybody regardless of his/her race, nationality, religion, political beliefs, and whatnot until today, and could rest assured that his/her Bitcoin kept in a self-custodial storage remains safe from any government agency that wish to seize it.

[Alpha Marine]

What a funny thing to read
Is this La La Land?
I can literally make any hypothesis and theories right now over anything. I can make a hypothesis of how gold can lose its place as a store of value. I can make a hypothesis of how the US would fall as the world's biggest economy. I can make a hypothesis of how a third world war would kick off soon, and many more hypotheses. All of what I would say are things that are possible but have a very, very small chance of happening in a practical world.
How do you write up theories and make them sound practical just to push an agenda?

How would the Bitcoin architecture be changed? Would the code be changed from open source to closed source?
Care to explain in a practical view (not theoretical) how the US government and large Bitcoin brokers would change the PoW consensus?
How many companies and countries would control the network if this happened? 
How significant is Bitcoin that the US government would be ready to go to war with other countries just so they can denounce Bitcoin and accept the new fork?

And how have you thrown away the economic concept in all of your hypotheses? Is a declaration the only thing that makes an asset perform well? So if the US declares, then everybody would continue to use it like normal. Bitcoin won't lose trust among investors? Simply increasing the hard cap to 50 million will make investors lose trust in Bitcoin, talk more of moving to a different network altogether.
If a declaration alone of the US is what it takes, then the dollar should be worth at least a $1000 above the pounds, Euro and every other major currency by now.

I'll give you a hypothesis where if the US tries to bully other countries to accept its fork, China and Russia (even though I don't rate them much in this kind of scenario) would oppose it, and would back many other countries. Are you saying the control of Bitcoin is worth going to war over? For an asset that may lose its value while you are fighting for it?
China and Russia didn't even go to war with the US over Venezuela and Iran. The US didn't go to war with Russia for Ukraine, but they will all go to war with each other for Bitcoin? For someone trying to diminish Bitcoin, you sure as hell overrate it. 

The reason Bitcoin isn't currently being controlled by the US government is because they don't feel like it. The current setup doesn't bother them, so they let it be. But it's not because of some "magic technical architecture" that makes it immune to political control.

If they could take control of it, they would have. They haven't taken control of it because they simply cannot. The scenario you just played out is not practical. The best they can do is make sure everybody uses it in a centralised way, but Bitcoin itself, they cannot take control of.
It's easier for the US to successfully carry out a 51% attack on the network to crash it than to take control of it.

[PepeLapiu]

With this political and financial support, they get the US Congress to pass a law declaring that this new fork is the "official Bitcoin" and every other fork is an illegal fake and cannot be called "Bitcoin".

Everyone knows how delusional and stupid the US regime is but not when it comes to propaganda. They are the best at it which means the morons are most familiar with it too.
In other words they will never make such a mistake of announcing such an attack like this. Any "centralized" coin the US regime creates will be abandoned immediately not by the world (that part is too obvious) but also by Americans and will become an immediate shitcoin.

If some day they wanted to carry out such a malicious attack, they'd do it in a much more subtle way. Making it look like their subjects have made that choice to abandon bitcoin and adopt a centralized shitcoin.

You are correct. If they were to attack Bitcoin, they would most likely do it in a cover manner.
In fact, if you consider what a threat to the status quo Bitcoin really is, you'd have to be lunatic not to expect it. They most certainly will attack Bitcoin in a covert manner. And in fact, I believe they have been attacking Bitcoin for quite some time now.

Join the team that will save Bitcoin. Run Knots, run BIP110.

snip

Bitcoin is open source; you can't control the software. It's an impossible task. Suppose the United States makes paperweights called Bitcoin, what's the difference?

You are being naive.
Imagine the software is being run by 90,000 node runners, but all of this software is being maintained and updated by a single entity called core.
Imagine most of the core devs who have commit access are all paid by 2 or 3 seamingly different companies or trusts.
Imagine that this core entity maintains a "mempool and relay policy". In other words, they decide for all the 90,000 nodes what they should put in their mempool and relay to others.

This is effectively a centralized mempool and relay policy manages by a centralized entity funded by 3 seemingly different companies.

If I were a government wanting to control or hurt bitcoin, I would set my sights on that segment of the network: the core devs.

[YOSHIE]

Please stop saying, "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments", because... it absolutely can, and to some extent already is.

Maybe what many people mean is "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by the government" from certain factors such as printing new Bitcoins or changing the basic rules of Bitcoin itself, maybe the government can't do it, the reason is because the creator of Bitcoin itself is still secret and hidden until now, unlike other types of crypto, clearly the creators of Ethereum and BNB are examples.

But the government can control Bitcoin completely, through taxation, regulation, adoption and they can control user access to exchanges in real terms with the rules they make, meaning they have full power over that.

In another sense, the government also has control over the activities of crypto exchange platforms, they can freeze all Bitcoin assets, as well as access to banks, for example, to process transactions to fiat originating from crypto exchanges, in my opinion this is how the government can control Bitcoin assets owned by users and exchanges.

[davis196]

The idea that "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments" is total bullshit. It's a product in the market just like any other. It's like saying "Microsoft Word cannot be controlled by any government". Sure it can, if the government really wanted to.

The reason Bitcoin isn't currently being controlled by the US government is because they don't feel like it. The current setup doesn't bother them, so they let it be. But it's not because of some "magic technical architecture" that makes it immune to political control. The US government has control of its $30T economy, and all of its benefits. You don't get to enjoy those benefits (for instance, thousands of new BTC investors coming in every day to make the value of your bags go higher and higher) without control. Real life doesn't work that way.

Be careful with what you write on this forum. You might trigger all the Bitcoin maximalists and fanatics.
Maybe Bitcoin has become "too big to fail". Any form of direct government intervention would crash the BTC price and many investors and corporations, that hold BTC would lose a lot of money. No government in the world wants to cause damage to wealthy people, because, you know, wealthy people are the ones, who donate money to the politicians(not just donations, but bribes as well). The US government is pretty much OK with the current state of Bitcoin, so there won't be any government backed forked version of Bitcoin. There are hidden forms of manipulation, that can achieve the goal without having to openly attack and impose direct control over a technology or an industry.

[Outhue]

The same government that lost fights with banning torrent? Good luck with your dream and it shows that you don't really understand what is going on, Bitcoin was never built in such a way that it will be a threat to centralised world, it is simply for people who got tired of centralisation and want decentralisation.

It doesn't exist to kill centralisation, which of course would be a bigger threat, but satoshi don't build it that way, bitcoin isn't even a privacy coin which I believe are more of a threat to centralisation than Bitcoin, the only thing bitcoin offers is decentralisation which can co-exists with centralisation.

[HONDACD125]

I would call that an illogical theory, because a fork is a fork and it cannot replace the main coin or its blockchain, even if it's done by a government and supported by companies and individuals with power and money, because they can't make everyone abandon the original one only for a fork, and it doesn't make any sense when you say that they can bully other countries into accepting such a law and asking their people to stop using the original Bitcoin and start using a new centralized version of it created by their government. Besides, why would companies and individuals such as Michael Saylor be interested in something like that when they know this is only going to cost them since they are making so much money through Bitcoin right now?

If it was that easy for the US government to erase Bitcoin by creating a version of it and imposing it on people then they would have done this a long time ago, but as the time went by, they realized that they can't stop Bitcoin from spreading, and almost the whole world is going to start using it eventually, so neither them nor any other government in the world have any other choice than to accept this and move on. They can regulate everything, just can't control the Bitcoin network and blockchain and they will have to live with it.

[eaLiTy]

~
BitTorrent doesn't have a market cap. It doesn't have brokers. It doesn't have billions of dollars of people's money in it. It doesn't have ETFs. The US has therefore no leverage over it--UNLIKE BITCOIN.

This clearly shows you have no idea what you are talking about. The entertainment industry was lobbying the government to interfere in the P2P networks well before 2005. The RIAA and MPAA lobbied the government, misrepresenting how billions of dollars are lost annually, and they started confiscating tracker websites and imprisoning site admins for running torrent trackers. While the government took all these actions, it was impossible to do anything to the P2P networks.

In your hypothetical story, even if they pass laws, they cannot rewrite the consensus rules of how a node is run globally. The core power lies with the nodes. Basically that fork will not be BTCitcoin.  

According to you and your 17 friends maybe, but if 99% of the MONEY goes to the other fork, then THAT is Bitcoin. And the government is what enforces trademarks, which means if you call your thing, "Bitcoin" you'll be put in jail.

May be you have won arguments against your school friends who have no idea what you are talking about. You need to understand the basics here, market capital and money does not identify the protocol identity.. Blockchain identity is defined by node consensus and cryptographic history, not by fiat value.

Bitcoin is not banned in China. Please get your facts straight. Regardless, I don't know what that has to do with this discussion...

I am actually impressed with the total amount of factual errors in one post. Since you have no idea about the history of BTCitcoin, China banned commercial banks and financial institutions from handling Bitcoin transactions in 2013 and has a complete ban on mining and trading at this present time.

Why this is relevant despite your rant about absolutely meaningless jargon is that, a ban from one country does not mean anything. US is not the center of the universe, these were your hyperbolic fantasies. The US is welcoming the crypto market and focusing on brining foreign investors and making it a global crypto hub.

This is exactly how the trademark of Bitcoin works today .

The reason why somebody can't come out with a new memecoin and call it "Bitcoin" and use the BTC symbol for it is because of trademark protection, and that protection comes from... the US government.

Another factual error, I am tried of counting your utopian theories.  
Governments enforce trademark laws, they do not create trademark rights out of a vacuum.  

[PepeLapiu]

This is exactly how the trademark of Bitcoin works today .

The reason why somebody can't come out with a new memecoin and call it "Bitcoin" and use the BTC symbol for it is because of trademark protection, and that protection comes from... the US government.

Another factual error, I am tried of counting your utopian theories.  
Governments enforce trademark laws, they do not create trademark rights out of a vacuum.  

:facepalm:

I had a good giggle at that one.
Bitcoin sign is not registered or trademarked anywhere. Nobody registered it with anyone else. It was just accepted by the community as the symbol for bitcoin.

This gross lack of understanding Bitcoin history shows OP is most likely a KYC bitcoiner with ETF and MSTR, no private keys, and desperately fighting against BIP110.

[legiteum]

snip

Bitcoin is open source; you can't control the software. It's an impossible task. Suppose the United States makes paperweights called Bitcoin, what's the difference? Would they control Bitcoin because of that? It's absurd. From the moment you fork the Bitcoin code, it ceases to be the original, and the US will never have the power to confiscate all the unguarded private keys.

You don't seem to understand how Bitcoin works. Most users wouldn't notice any difference at all. Your keys would still work, as would all of the tools you use. The blocks would be copied. The only thing that matters is the set of servers that the tools point at, and when ever major tool like the brokers, the wallets, and ETFs and the major holders all point at the US government-approve network, then most people won't even know anything changed, and they wouldn't care.

Meanwhile, the original network would be declared illegal, and anybody who offered a tool that pointed at and still called their product, "Bitcoin" would be prosecuted in the same way that they would if somebody created their own fork and called it "Bitcoin".

As soon as laws are passed that harm these companies, they'll flee the country, I assure you.

These companies would be faced with losing all of their money or simply complying with the new law. It's obvious what choice they would make.

I myself care about the value of my life savings that's into Bitcoin, but I don't think everybody, except 0.00002% of them, would leave Bitcoin if your scenario becomes real. I don't think Bitcoin's decentralization has no value today.

Of course they wouldn't leave "Bitcoin". They would leave the now-illegal thing that can no longer be called "Bitcoin".

They would choose the network where their coins were the most valuable.

One network would have the major holders, the US president, Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, CoinBase, Binance, Robinhood, Blackrock, all of the ETFs, and basically the entire US financial system there to help keep it trading and valuable.

The old fork would have... a bunch of pissed off Bitcoin hardcores who only cared about the religion and not the money.

In other words, 99% of the money would be on the US government fork. Duh.

As far as I know, anybody who self-custodies Bitcoin can still send Sats to anybody regardless of his/her race, nationality, religion, political beliefs, and whatnot until today, and could rest assured that his/her Bitcoin kept in a self-custodial storage remains safe from any government agency that wish to seize it.

Um, self-custody does not protect you from a government anymore than hiding a stolen car in your garage or gold coins in your basement does.

Also, believe it or not, ~99% of Bitcoin is probably not used for criminality and tax evasion, it's simply an investment for most people.

Besides, people who want to do criminal stuff and keep their money from the government use Monero these days. Bitcoin is an open ledger and traceable--sorta lousy for doing crime.

How would the Bitcoin architecture be changed?

In another thread, we discussed how the Bitcoin network could be scaled to handle everyday payments, which would make it much more useful, and probably much more valuable--but it would require dropping PoW and making the architecture much more centralized.

Anyhow, that wasn't the point of the OP. The point was that it's not "impossible" that Bitcoin be taken over by the US government. In fact, it's already been heavily regulated, and taking over the network itself would be trivial since it's the US government that enforces the trademark, "Bitcoin".

How significant is Bitcoin that the US government would be ready to go to war with other countries just so they can denounce Bitcoin and accept the new fork?

"Denounce"? They would be improving Bitcoin, at least in their own opinion.

Simply increasing the hard cap to 50 million will make investors lose trust in Bitcoin,

So they wouldn't do that.

I'll give you a hypothesis where if the US tries to bully other countries to accept its fork, China and Russia (even though I don't rate them much in this kind of scenario) would oppose it, and would back many other countries.

So what. Almost all of the market cap from Bitcoin comes from the US financial system. And they don't need to own it all in order to effectively blackmail everybody else into accepting their fork.

Are you saying the control of Bitcoin is worth going to war over? For an asset that may lose its value while you are fighting for it?
China and Russia didn't even go to war with the US over Venezuela and Iran.

Why would China or Russia care what the US did with Bitcoin? Especially if their own holdings were perfectly safe and still tradable? If the Russian government hated it, they could just sell their Bitcoin and buy some other crypto, or gold, or whatever.

I know y'all love The Bitcoin Religion a lot, but nobody is going to go to war over it .

Be careful with what you write on this forum. You might trigger all the Bitcoin maximalists and fanatics.

Gee I hadn't noticed .

Maybe Bitcoin has become "too big to fail". Any form of direct government intervention would crash the BTC price and many investors and corporations, that hold BTC would lose a lot of money. No government in the world wants to cause damage to wealthy people, because, you know, wealthy people are the ones, who donate money to the politicians(not just donations, but bribes as well). The US government is pretty much OK with the current state of Bitcoin, so there won't be any government backed forked version of Bitcoin. There are hidden forms of manipulation, that can achieve the goal without having to openly attack and impose direct control over a technology or an industry.

That's a very good argument for why the US government would not want to do this. But that's not the point of the OP. The point was that the US absolutely could do this if they wanted to.

And that means that Bitcoin is absolutely not impervious to government control like the hardcores keep saying it is.

The US government hasn't taken over the Bitcoin network because they don't feel like it, not because it's impossible.

I would call that an illogical theory, because a fork is a fork and it cannot replace the main coin or its blockchain,

A Bitcoin fork using the same chain data could create a fully compatible product that would preserve everybody's coins. There have already been many projects that do this. They aren't called "Bitcoin" like the US government's would be called, but they work exactly like Bitcoin, including using the same blockchain.

Besides, why would companies and individuals such as Michael Saylor be interested in something like that when they know this is only going to cost them since they are making so much money through Bitcoin right now?

The OP is not asking why they would do it, only pointing out that's its entirely possible and not even that hard for them to do. So please stop saying, "Bitcoin cannot be taken over by governments" when it absolutely can be.

If it was that easy for the US government to erase Bitcoin by creating a version of it and imposing it on people then they would have done this a long time ago,

No, they wouldn't have. Bitcoin has been defacto legal for at least 10 years now. There are gigantic public companies who own Bitcoin, as does the president of the United States. The reason the US government hasn't taken over the Bitcoin network is because they haven't found a reason to do so. But they easily could.

This is exactly how the trademark of Bitcoin works today .

The reason why somebody can't come out with a new memecoin and call it "Bitcoin" and use the BTC symbol for it is because of trademark protection, and that protection comes from... the US government.

Another factual error, I am tried of counting your utopian theories. 
Governments enforce trademark laws, they do not create trademark rights out of a vacuum. 

Insofar as "nobody" owns the trademark "Bitcoin", then it's a public thing, and therefore governments will define it. Today, if you came out with a fork and called it "Bitcoin" and it didn't use the network they think it should use (e.g. the one everybody uses right now for instance), then the US government would prosecute. But that definition is completely up to the US government since there is no original owner. If Bitcoin is not a trademark, then the problem is still there: the US Congress needs to define "what is Bitcoin" in order to defend against fraud. Today that definition is implicit, but it could be made explicit, and it could be anything they choose it to be, and they could change it over time as well.

[PepeLapiu]

As soon as laws are passed that harm these companies, they'll flee the country, I assure you.

These companies would be faced with losing all of their money or simply complying with the new law. It's obvious what choice they would make.

What you are saying happened in the past. In fact, you should ask yourself why there are so many miners in the USA.

Not so long ago, almost all the mining was done in China as they are energy rich. Plenty of hydro poser plants, nuclear plants, and coal plants too.

China made mining illegal. Almost overnight, all the miners moved to the USA.

If the USA makes it too hard for them to mine, they will move all their machines elsewhere. In fact, some miners are full mobile. They operate in shipping containers and they move from one power station to an other to chase the cheap power.

During the spring when hydro plants have plenty of power to spare, they move there. And during the windy season, they move next to a wind farm.

Miners are location agnostic. They don't get paid in USD, they get paid in BTC, the money of the internet.

Most users wouldn't notice any difference at all. Your keys would still work, as would all of the tools you use. The blocks would be copied. The only thing that matters is the set of servers that the tools point at, and when ever major tool like the brokers, the wallets, and ETFs and the major holders all point at the US government-approve network, then most people won't even know anything changed, and they wouldn't care.
Meanwhile, the original network would be declared illegal, and anybody who offered a tool that pointed at and still called their product, "Bitcoin" would be prosecuted in the same way that they would if somebody created their own fork and called it "Bitcoin".

You are somewhat correct in your assumption that a state level attacker with access to the money printer would be very motivated to attack Bitcoin and subvert it.

Your failure of understanding is in the execution.

Uncle Sam could very well make a law to force all miners to reject Iranian UTXOs. And Foundry and Mara may surely obey the new law. But it's completely useless. Because any miner outside the USA with a few machines in his shed could pick up all the Iranian txs and include them in his block. And he can do it all anonimously. Nothing forces him to put his name in the coinbase inscription.

And the 90,000 nodes will accept those Iranian UTXOs as valid. And over 60% of the nodes are on the Tor network. We have no idea where they are. And a large number of those not on Tor likely use a VPN.

The only defence against a state level attack is the nodes. The 90,000 nodes are the only part of Bitcoin that is too hard to corrupt and control. And we need a million more nodes. We don't have enough nodes.

[Bastketsrus]

How do you define control? In the specific scenario that you provided, in what way did the US government control Bitcoin? The number of users isn't Bitcoin. The price of BTC isn't Bitcoin. The level of support, whether retail or institutional, isn't Bitcoin.

As a matter of fact, what is Bitcoin? If the new altcoin that's created is named Bitcoin by way of a law, if Bitcoin is equated with decentralization, then what they have won't ever be considered Bitcoin. And it's next to impossible to make the real Bitcoin centralized.

In the end, the Bitcoin that's made way less popular remained as it is, uncontrolled, decentralized, borderless, seizure-proof, censorship-resistant, and so on.

I agree. Governments can regulate exchanges and businesses, but they can't change how Bitcoin itself works. The network doesn't care about borders or politics, and that's one of its biggest strengths.

[PepeLapiu]

Very interesting. I scanned the thread for the word "money" and none of you refer to bitcoin as money. The only times you all refer to money is when talking about fiat.

In the end, the Bitcoin that's made way less popular remained as it is, uncontrolled, decentralized, borderless, seizure-proof, censorship-resistant, and so on.

Most importantly, Bitcoin is money.
It's not censorship resistant dickbutt.jpeg.
It's not seizure-proof fake pubkets.
It's not borderless runes or rare sats.

You people can not understand the problem because you are the problem.

Guess what? The world doesn't have a borderless dickbutt.jpeg problem. The government is not after your stupid Bitcoin stamps.
If you don't honor bitcoin as money, all your retarded shitcoinery will kill bitcoin along with your useless rare sats.

[Aanuoluwatofunmi]

This is already an established fact that we know, bitcoin cannot be controlled by the government because it is a decentralized currency and we don't see it going under any central authority or censorship, it is a coin that is aimed at an individual discretion to determine on what to do or how to go about it, when we are talking about Fiat currency, then it's follows the government directives and control unlike the way bitcoin is decentralized.

[BitBrainers]

Imagine this scenario.

A group of large Bitcoin brokers like, say, Binance, CoinBase, Robinhood and MasterCard, decided that the Bitcoin architecture should be changed to make it scale to everyday payments, and in the process swapping out the Proof-Of-Work architecture to a trusted centralized architecture driven by a few well-known companies.

Obviously the "hard core" Bitcoiners on the internet would freak out, and vow never to use their fork.

Now imagine that these giant companies lobbied the US government, and also got key players like Michael Saylor, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump on their side. With this political and financial support, they get the US Congress to pass a law declaring that this new fork is the "official Bitcoin" and every other fork is an illegal fake and cannot be called "Bitcoin". The US president, who would be on board with this change (say it made his own family a lot of $$$), would also use the military and economic might of the US government to bully many other countries to accept this new law.

The result would be that ~98% of the value of BTC holdings would fall in line with this new change. They would have no choice since the value of the original Bitcoin fork would be non-tradable in all of the major trading platforms, whereas the US government's fork would be tradable almost everywhere Bitcoin is traded today. Hence the market cap of the fork would be where Bitcoin's is today, at around $1 trillion, and the fork's market cap would be utterly tiny, probably not even breaking a few million.

Put it another way, you could use your keys on either network and access your Bitcoin. One would allow you to trade on mainstream platforms, trade with ETFs, and would have the full backing of the US government, and other would be a network that would include yourself and a few hundred Bitcoin religious hard-cores. In one network your BTC would be tradable for $10,000 in physical goods and services, and in the other it would be tradable for $1.49 in physical goods and services. Which one is any average person going to choose?

To 99% of Bitcoin users, all they will care about is their money being safe. They would go with the flow and not risk their savings on an illegal network.

The idea that "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments" is total bullshit. It's a product in the market just like any other. It's like saying "Microsoft Word cannot be controlled by any government". Sure it can, if the government really wanted to.

The reason Bitcoin isn't currently being controlled by the US government is because they don't feel like it. The current setup doesn't bother them, so they let it be. But it's not because of some "magic technical architecture" that makes it immune to political control. The US government has control of its $30T economy, and all of its benefits. You don't get to enjoy those benefits (for instance, thousands of new BTC investors coming in every day to make the value of your bags go higher and higher) without control. Real life doesn't work that way.

Please stop saying, "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments", because... it absolutely can, and to some extent already is.

The distinction worth making is between controlling Bitcoin's market value and controlling the Bitcoin protocol. You are right that the US government could influence where the economic majority goes. BSV had exchange listings, corporate backing, and legal threats behind it. It is worth essentially nothing today while the original chain kept both the name and the value. Economic weight followed the network that maintained the original rules, not the one with institutional support. Your scenario assumes that whoever controls the money controls the identity of Bitcoin. The history of Bitcoin forks says otherwise.

[legiteum]

These companies would be faced with losing all of their money or simply complying with the new law. It's obvious what choice they would make.

What you are saying happened in the past. In fact, you should ask yourself why there are so many miners in the USA.

Not so long ago, almost all the mining was done in China as they are energy rich. Plenty of hydro poser plants, nuclear plants, and coal plants too.

China made mining illegal. Almost overnight, all the miners moved to the USA.

There's actually still mining going on in China as I understand it, but the OP has nothing to do with mining per se.

Indeed, one change to the codebase could be to eliminate the need for mining altogether with a code change to the core.

You are somewhat correct in your assumption that a state level attacker with access to the money printer would be very motivated to attack Bitcoin and subvert it.

I've been saying the opposite in fact: that the US government hasn't been motivated at all to change the Bitcoin codebase because... they don't care. In US politics, there's no motivation to make changes to Bitcoin, so Congress has not attempted to do so.

But if the political winds changed, then they could. That's the point of the OP: they Bitcoin is not magically impervious to government intervention.

The only defence against a state level attack is the nodes. The 90,000 nodes are the only part of Bitcoin that is too hard to corrupt and control. And we need a million more nodes. We don't have enough nodes.

90k or a million or ten million nodes wouldn't matter if the definition of Bitcoin, and thus its technical architecture, was changed by an act of Congress.

What matters is the money. Nobody cares how Bitcoin works, only that their BTC holdings can be traded for valuable things, e.g. its price in USD. The US can effectively control the value of their holdings (say by making them nearly worthless by passing laws against them unless you used their new network), which means the US can control Bitcoin. It's really that simple. All of this stuff about nodes and mining is beside the point.

Please stop saying, "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments", because... it absolutely can, and to some extent already is.

The distinction worth making is between controlling Bitcoin's market value and controlling the Bitcoin protocol. You are right that the US government could influence where the economic majority goes. BSV had exchange listings, corporate backing, and legal threats behind it. It is worth essentially nothing today while the original chain kept both the name and the value. Economic weight followed the network that maintained the original rules, not the one with institutional support. Your scenario assumes that whoever controls the money controls the identity of Bitcoin. The history of Bitcoin forks says otherwise.

There is no instance in history where there was a fork sanctioned by the US government, and a law passed saying all other forks are illegal in the USA.

Economic weight has always followed the thing that could legally be called, "Bitcoin" in the US. If you have a fork and advertise it as "Bitcoin" today, you'll go to prison. But the US Congress could pass a law saying in effect, "this codebase here is the only thing that can be called, 'Bitcoin'". The money would absolutely follow that. The new network would be "Bitcoin" and everything else would be a fork. Why? Because of the thousands of apps all run by companies that could be prosecuted by the US, along with the ETFs, the major brokers, major holders, Strategy, etc. None of these entities would dare risk prosecution, so they would support the US law. And end-users would just want whatever ensured that their BTC was still valuable, and an illegal fork would be nearly worthless compared to the sanctioned, legal fork.

[CryptoYar]

First is that bitcoin value is result of being free and having network effect. That split would not be Bitcoin in any real way if US government forced PoW to centralized switch. It wouldnt be anything but a controlled digital currency, and there is enough of them out there already. Original chain would still remain and still be mined all over the world.

Secondly, not all mining takes place in the U.S. Computers are in use all around the world. The US government has no ability to pressure the Russians or the Chinese or dozens of other countries to do so. Indeed, it is likely that those countries would back the original chain simply to fight the influence of United States.

Third, the situation is that everyone is just chasing the $$$ and gives up their values. However, Bitcoin original investors are not your typical everyday investors. They know what they have and know why. It is not easy for the US to make things difficult, for sure. However, original bitcoin can only be destroyed and not controlled.

[legiteum]

[...]
Third, the situation is that everyone is just chasing the $$$ and gives up their values. However, Bitcoin original investors are not your typical everyday investors. They know what they have and know why. It is not easy for the US to make things difficult, for sure. However, original bitcoin can only be destroyed and not controlled.

[* Emphasis added]

That's the underlying point I've been making: Bitcoin investors just want Number Go Up. They don't care about anything else.

I agree that some consumer Bitcoin investors are interested in the "religion" aspect of Bitcoin, I'm willing to bet that's a tiny portion of the money involved in the system. Somebody buying the ETF for clicking on a button on their Robinhood app doesn't care about "decentralization" or whatever. Almost all BTC investors these days just want to buy a thingy for X so they can later sell it for 2X and buy nice things for their life, or retire, or whatever.

An illegal fork that could not be called "Bitcoin" in the US and at least some of its allies would be... almost worthless from a market standpoint.

All of that yummy infrastructure that's exploded the price of BTC over the years, like the licensed brokers, the known apps, the major wallet companies, the ETFs, and corporate balance sheet, etc. etc. etc... All of those billions and billions of dollars would all never touch a thing that the US government declared illegal, and they would have no tangible reason to if there was a functional alternative.

All this is to say that the idea of the US government controlling the Bitcoin codebase is absolutely possible, and even plausible. But the point of the OP wasn't even that, it's to stop people from repeating the totally false statement that, "Bitcoin can't be taken over by a government". It absolutely can. That doesn't mean it will be, and it might keep going in its current state forever, but it's not magically immune to government intervention because of some technical architecture.

[CryptoYar]

[...]

You are so confused on price action being a network control. While the financial involvement may be at the hands of Wall Street buyers who click buttons on app, they dont actually operate the basic background setup. They dont host computers, they dont mine blocks and they certainly dont make rule decisions.

If government tries to do code takeover, then they just develop a company split following them. Yes, the ruled setup will follow it but the true global chain of free miners and computer operators will simply continue to maintain the original chain elsewhere. Full bans have been attempted on the network by major countries and the network only rerouted and continued to produce blocks. The rules themselves are completely beyond the control of any country, code is not concerned with local laws. There could be huge drop for the market value in the beginning, but the original free system will always be out of their reach.