Total BS: "Bitcoin cannot be controlled by governments"

[legiteum]

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.

So what? They collectively determine the price of BTC, which is all anybody cares about. The price of BTC is not determined by how many nodes there are, or if there is PoW or not. It's determined by individual consumer investors deciding to invest or not invest. If more investors invest, the price goes up. If more investors trade out of BTC, the price goes down. Nothing else matters to almost all holders of BTC today. Because of that, the US could blackmail investors into accepting whatever they wanted them to accept.

You have a right to use whatever code you want, but you don't have a right to have unfettered access to US consumer financial markets. But those markets are exactly how Bitcoin gets almost all of its tradable value.

[Smartprofit]

The United States is just one country out of 193 countries that currently exist on our planet. How many people live in the United States? 500 million? And there are 8 billion people on the planet in total! 🙋

In my opinion, most people will not accept the American fork of Bitcoin. In fact, a very large portion of the world's population is not connected to the American financial system. They cannot buy shares of American companies, shares of spot ETFs, US Treasury bonds, etc. So the question arises: why would they support the American fork? Just because of their sympathy for Donald Trump and Elon Musk?

Bitcoin doesn't need any government permission to function. Bitcoin is mathematics and cryptography. That's why it's so valuable. Donald Trump has already created several tokens (their prices have already collapsed), and that's the most he can do. He won't create another Bitcoin.💁

[ColdLava40]

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

They could name it BTC.us, it still won't be Bitcoin.

You make it sound like the us has power over all other countries in the world and when they find something offensive or make a decree then it should stand. They can only impose such laws in the states.

Bitcoin cannot be controlled by the government, it should sink into your head. Just think about it somehow, if the government could take control of Bitcoin, it's over a decade now.

Why haven't they done it? You should really understand the concept behind being decentralization.whst government controls is not bitcoin, they control platforms that are centralized. It has nothing to do with BTC.

[Onyeeze]

but I doubt the government can totally control the core layer of Bitcoin.  And btw, I don't think that the US is the only country on Earth. 

we don't need to argue much on this because we know that is not possible for government to control the core layer of Bitcoin, because if it is possible government would have done that earlier before now but we all know have experienced what bitcoin has battled in the hands of government especially the time it was newly created and many countries government does not want bitcoin to stand so if it is possible for them they would have control the Bitcoin from initial why I can see that Bitcoin is out of their control

[Cookdata]

Bitcoin is open source, so I can't help but wonder why it took nearly two decades for Bitcoin to unify their vision against Bitcoin. They could have forked it and seen if it survived, at least against their own internal conflicts. Uniting and sustaining large companies around a single ideology for as long as possible is harder than keeping a single ice cream cone frozen in your hand.

You think the US doesn't know about this? They are rather amazed with the fact that somebody actually pulled this off before them and the fact that it becomes a recognition world wide, they want the full control which was impossible. Donald Trump was gaslighted that China was trying to take control of Bitcoin(propaganda as usual) and he used that to campaign and make it's look friendly for united state but deep down, I'm not too convinced with US acceptance.

I saw a report today that Donald Trump family has made $2.3B from crypto, nice profits isn't? Thanks to their meme coins they dump on people that trusted them and that useless liberty coin they sold to investors to generate money. With all that has been happening in crypto space, I will like to know what they are going to do to Trump family by the time the immunity doesn't cover them again otherwise I will be fully prepare any day they want to start their selfish regulations to disorganized the entire crypto.

[Dewali]

 I don't at anything in nearst future bitcoin will be ever be controlled by U.S government or an institution whose intention  have always been to control  financial systems and limit the freedom at which the masses can express will . The main purpose of the creation of bitcoin was to provide a decentralised digital currency that operates without a trusted third party such as government or institution.

[rat03gopoh]

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.

Yes, they can. The big question is: if that becomes a general fact, will everyone eventually use the "US version of bitcoin"? What they can't do is convince everyone in the world; on the contrary, they dislike even the slightest threat or competition. For example, the US dislikes the BRICS and their currencies. If they try to control bitcoin with policy, they will only make more competing forks surface and obviously favor the enemy.

[legiteum]

The United States is just one country out of 193 countries that currently exist on our planet.

It's the country with the largest economy, by far the largest investor class, and arguably most of the holdings of BTC. Lumping the USA in with Bolivia or Tuvalu is dishonest. It's like saying, "Elon Musk is just one of 320 million Americans so who cares about his opinion?".

In my opinion, most people will not accept the American fork of Bitcoin. In fact, a very large portion of the world's population is not connected to the American financial system. They cannot buy shares of American companies, shares of spot ETFs, US Treasury bonds, etc. So the question arises: why would they support the American fork? Just because of their sympathy for Donald Trump and Elon Musk?

They would support it because the non-US approved fork of "Bitcoin" would be almost worthless, and the US-approved fork would be worth $billions. They would support it because it would be a coin they could use in the USA and its allies, and the alternative would be illegal in the USA.

They could name it BTC.us, it still won't be Bitcoin.

You make it sound like the us has power over all other countries in the world and when they find something offensive or make a decree then it should stand. They can only impose such laws in the states.

No, they would name it "Bitcoin", and prosecute anybody who called their project "Bitcoin".

The US has the power to control what is within it's own dominion, which is where most of the holdings of BTC are, where the largest holders of BTC are, where the largest Bitcoin and crypto companies are, where all of the ETFs are, and so on. The US thus has decisive control over the value of Bitcoin, which is all anybody cares about.
[/quote]

Bitcoin cannot be controlled by the government, it should sink into your head. Just think about it somehow, if the government could take control of Bitcoin, it's over a decade now.

Did you know that the President of the USA has almost a half billion in BTC? Did you know it's been legal here basically since it began? The US has never cared to stop or change Bitcoin, so they have never tried.

[...] they control platforms that are centralized. It has nothing to do with BTC.

Those centralized platforms are how BTC is purchased by investors, which connects to the world's financial markets. That is why Bitcoin is worth over $1 trillion, and not $100,000.

Yes, they can. The big question is: if that becomes a general fact, will everyone eventually use the "US version of bitcoin"? What they can't do is convince everyone in the world; on the contrary, they dislike even the slightest threat or competition. For example, the US dislikes the BRICS and their currencies. If they try to control bitcoin with policy, they will only make more competing forks surface and obviously favor the enemy.

They can't force anybody outside of the US an its allies, but they can certainly bribe them. People would have to choose between networks, and the US version would have the entire US financial system connected to it, which is mostly how BTC gets its value, and the other one would be banned in the US. It's pretty obvious which would be 100-1000x more valuable.

When we discussed changing Bitcoin's architecture in
another thread, while this was obviously abhorrent to all of the Bitcoin hard-core religious fanatics, people who just wanted their BTC to become more valuable were open-minded. If you changed Bitcoin to be faster and cheaper to transact, it could be used for thousands of times more transactions (like, every one on earth), and this could make it far more valuable than it is today because it would actually have utility.

I'm not going to get into that debate again here, but my point is that it's not automatically the case that everybody would hate the US-approved fork--it would only happen if a lot of people supported the idea, i.e. US voters. And the OP's scenario is that major players like Saylor, Musk and Trump would be part of this, for instance. This wouldn't be just some bureaucrat in the US government somewhere making some weird change.

[rat03gopoh]

They can't force anybody outside of the US an its allies, but they can certainly bribe them.

Now, you're looking even more unrealistic, bribing everyone around the world, or at least the leaders, to enact special laws to support a US-version of Bitcoin fork? Haha... Why would the US do all that, for an entity that wasn't even theirs to begin with, and whose source code can be copied endlessly, thinking that all the interests and visions of many people can be united?

That doesn't mean I'm against you, because no matter who believes in Bitcoin, I will always oppose such unrealistic and nearly impossible ideas.

[legiteum]

They can't force anybody outside of the US an its allies, but they can certainly bribe them.

Now, you're looking even more unrealistic, bribing everyone around the world, or at least the leaders, to enact special laws to support a US-version of Bitcoin fork?

 

No, that's not what I meant.

I meant that the threat of the US and its financial system and its very rich consumers (who clearly own most of Bitcoin today), along with the biggest BTC holders like Saylor, Musk and Trump, along with all of the biggest Bitcoin companies will effectively bribe Bitcoin users to use the network that is valued in the $billions instead of the one without all of these players which would be valued in the $thousands.

In other words, if you currently have your savings in BTC, the US fork would be the only one that would allow you to keep those savings because the other network would be almost worthless without all of those huge players and without the US consumer base.

[pooya87]

I meant that the threat of the US and its financial system and its very rich consumers (who clearly own most of Bitcoin today), along with the biggest BTC holders like Saylor, Musk and Trump, along with all of the biggest Bitcoin companies will effectively bribe Bitcoin users to use the network that is valued in the $billions instead of the one without all of these players which would be valued in the $thousands.

The shittokens that the Epstein class of people you keep namedropping here created is not worth anything and nobody care about using that. If they could push for anything they would have done it for what they already 100% control not for something they can never control and will be so controversial.

Not to mention that the weak US regime has not even been capable of preventing the world from dumping the dollar which is far more important than your hypothetical but centralized fork of bitcoin. How could they "bribe" anyone to use their shitfork when they can't bribe then to continue using the dollar?

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

Change the threshold from 55% to at least 90% and I'll think about it.

[X-ray]

How do you know that kind of law will work anyway outside the U.S.?

There is no way to find out if that will work because there are country out there and the essence of bitcoin is, even if there is a fork, you can keep using the current existing bitcoin without any problem.

Price might change, doesn't mean this other fork will automatically become the real Bitcoin. At that point, people vote with their wallet and mining hashrate.

[PepeLapiu]

Here is what everyone here is ignoring and for some reason, you also chose to dismiss my as "knotzy".

Yes, Uncle Sam could tell the big miners based in the USA that they have to ban all Iranian UTXOs. Or tell then to accept only KYC'd coins. And the USA based miners would likely comply.

This just means that my El Salvador based ASICs can pick up the extra fees from the Iranian UTXOs banned in the USA.
And you just try and get the 90,000 nodes to go along with that and invalidate all the Iranian UTXOs. Good luck with that, Uncle Sam. We don't even know where most of those nodes are based. 60% of them are on the Tor network. And the 40% on the clearnet are probably running on a VPN.

So, than Uncle Sam could decide to step it up and somehow proppose a soft fork that would invalidate all the Iranian UTXOs. And for good measure, Uncle Sam could also spin up a million nodes on AWS to give thevillusion that this fork gas genuine support.

But someone somewhere is going to notice: " Hey, the nodes count just jumped from 90,000 to 1,090,000 over night. And all those new nodes are all running the new anti-Iranian soft fork client. This is a Sybil attack, obviously."

And the plebs running nodes will all get behind a user reactive soft fork client that would reject the anti-Iranian soft fork. Your block bans Iranian UTXOs? Into the garbage bin it goes!

And you wouldn't need that many URSF nodes. Everyone will know they are genuine nodes against 1 million fake ones. Even as few as 500 or 5,000 URSF nodes would defeat the anti-Iranian fork. This isn't a democracy, guys.

A handful of miners control 90%+ of the hash power and what goes into blocks. They are relatively easy to compromise or control.

Only two competing entities control 99% of the software run by nodes: core and Knots. They too are relatively easy to compromise, given they are both based in the USA.

The only part of the network that is untouchable is the 90,000 nodes. The nodes are the only thing that keeps Bitcoin decentralized. So of course, of some entity wanted to compromise or control Bitcoin, the large number of nodes is the real problem.

The nodes are where a state level attacker would have to set their sights on. Understand? Agreed?

So if I were a state level attacker, or if I were the head of a transnational banking cartel, here is what I would do. Not sayin' but just sayin':

I would inflitrate core and start to finance the core devs. Because up until a year ago, core fully controlled the software that went into 99% of the nodes. This is the weak link to compromise or control the nodes.

Slowly and gradually, I would start to shift the use case of Bitcoin from censorship resistant money to shotcoinery.

When core removed that last mention of the word "money" in their documentation, I financed that, I did that through my puppet devs.

When core rejected the ordinal filter in 2023, I did that, me, the head of the banking cartel.

When the devs went on podcasts, insulted bitcoiners who don't believe in NFTs and shitcoinery, I did that. My paid and compromised devs did that. [evil grin]

When the core devs blew up a malware filter in the middle of a 4 year long malware attack, I did that. My paid and bough for devs did that for me.

When my talking heads went on podcasts and referred to malware as "use cases we have today" and talked about anti- malware measures as a form of Nazi censorship, I did that.

As the head of the transnational banking cartel, my goal is to gradually shift the direction of Bitcoin awaybfron money, and into shitcoinery, scams, malware, and other nonsense.

This should result in chain bloat, and UTXO bloat. It's going to make it harder to run a node or run a miner at a small scale.

And at some point, when I'm good and ready, I will just swamp the blockchain with tons and tons of gross disgusting immoral and illegal files. This will force nodes to either quit, or be forced rmto host traffic disgusting content, and relay it to other nodes.

And since it's in one piece in op_return, a simple scan of the nodes files will quickly find all that malware and disgust. Many many nodes are likely to turn off. They don't want the legal rusk, they don't want the moral risk, they don't want the social stigma of operating a child porn distribution network out if their own home. Especially when you consider a node runner is not getting paid for anything.

And as the node count drops, me, the evil head of banking cartel, starts adding more and more of my own nodes to the network. So nobody will notice that someone is installing Sybil nodes. They'll just think the disgusting chilp files have no effect on the node count.

And as I replace many many real nodes that turn off with my own bank run nodes, my paid shills at cote will say: "See! The node count doesn't even drop. Node runners don't care if there is child porn on their machines. Knotzies were wrong all along."

So you have two choices:

You can keep ignoring my posts and laugh at them.
Or you can join the fight, run BIP110. You can even run BIP110 on your core node if you want. You don't even have to switch to Knots.

The choice is yours. Bitcoin needs you.

[o48o]

Say this if the government totally controlled BitTorrent, a well-known decentralized file sharing.    It been a decade of cracking and tracking but the government still failed to totally control this kind of decentralized file sharing.

And about Bitcoin the government can control the second layer of Bitcoin because most of these are centralized company integrate their service through this layer, but I doubt the government can totally control the core layer of Bitcoin.  And btw, I don't think that the US is the only country on Earth.  

Governments that are big and essential enough, can sure sue centralized torrent sites as long as there's cash flow to follow. Just like piratebay made money from indexing the content. They can also sue individuals for sharing content, but stopping the protocol would be near impossible, unless service providers are able to access and monitor prevent certain content to be shared. This is option getting to be more real possibility, with data surveillance growing.

In same way they technically could sue every financial institute dealing with Bitcoin. Right now, regulations only apply to AML laws and tax evasion. And why would they ban it when they are making money from it?

But let's play like they would want to ban bitcoin: They can't stop the protocol, but what they could do is to ban every financial institution in their region to deal with bitcoins. This would mean that HUGE amount of liquidity would be removed even though it would be only US banning it, and if more countries would join, we would be back on 2010 market cap fast as hell. Imho this would be good for bitcoin, as it would move it underground. But it would absolutely destroy the price and lead to only individuals being able to buy and sell it, trying to hide where their money from those gains is originating from.

But as long as it can be taxed and traced, and as long it's not imminent danger to a country, i don't see many countries opposing it. They could however rise taxes for mining so it would be unprofitable to mine. They could raise taxes from trading it and raise taxes for companies dealing with it. Reasons could be anything from energy crisis to environmental issues.

[Synchronice]

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.

Let's theoretically assume that Michael Saylor, Elon Musk and also the biggest holders of Bitcoins, like exchanges, decided to support this idea what you are telling to us. How beneficial will this be for these companies? Don't you think that lots of people will sell their hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins? And if they sell, the price of the Bitcoin will significantly go down and it will be a huge financial attack on these people and businesses? They'll see billions of dollars capital loss and their businesses might collapse.

Also, the congress can't make the centralized fork to be called Bitcoin, the ledger is only updated by nodes that accept blocks under their chosen consensus rules. Doesn't matter what kind of power the US has, they can't force other countries to ban official Bitcoin and declare a new fork as the original one, that's simply impossible.

[justdimin]

I'm not going to get into that debate again here, but my point is that it's not automatically the case that everybody would hate the US-approved fork--it would only happen if a lot of people supported the idea, i.e. US voters. And the OP's scenario is that major players like Saylor, Musk and Trump would be part of this, for instance. This wouldn't be just some bureaucrat in the US government somewhere making some weird change.

No matter what you say or how you twist the facts or whatever, the thing is, what they will create won't be the Bitcoin we know or the one that exists right now, so they won't basically be controlling Bitcoin, but a fake Bitcoin that they have created, and that proves the point itself that they cannot control Bitcoin, which is why they will have to create another version of it, ban the current original version, force their people and try to force other countries and their people as well to accept and use what they have created, which is a fake version of Bitcoin, only so that they can have control over it, but in reality, they will only have control over what they have created and not what Satoshi has created.

It's such a simple thing to understand and I don't understand why we are having such a long debate over this. We all know that they can't control Bitcoin and its network or the transactions being made or the blockchain and its data, even OP knows it, and if they fork it, change the consensus mechanism from PoW to something else, remove miners so that they can control everything, may even increase the supply, then I don't understand why we are discussing how it is possible for them to control Bitcoin, because that won't be them controlling Bitcoin, they will be controlling a fork they've created.

[suzanne5223]

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.

And this won't lead to another World War, which I believe the US government won't want their crypto decision to be the major cause when other countries have their own rules and regulations. Besides, we can make use of Bitcoin through privacy practice without they know the geographical location of the person that use the BTC.
Second, we don't need the support of Binance, Coinbase, and others for BTC to be number 1, and the last time I checked, all these organizations adopted BTC to get their own cake.
You may not know that President Trump acknowledged BTC because he got a favor from it when the institutional banks restricted him from using his funds during the campaign, and he used BTC. Despite this, if he chooses to support the BTC fork, he hasn't learned his lesson.

[Myleschetty]

First, i consider the possibility that the fork BTC might happened, but after you said, "use the military and economic might of the US government to bully many other countries to accept this new law.". "I don't think the BTC fork will succeed because the majority of US presidents support nations autonomy to manage their own internal affairs, select their own leaders, and establish their own policies free from outside interference. Trump once stated in public that all states are equal under international law and that sovereignty is the foundation of international order.
Naturally, if the fork BTC is create an get the attention of other countries, that's fine, but the use of bullying is out of the question.

[legiteum]

The shittokens that the Epstein class of people you keep namedropping here created is not worth anything and nobody care about using that. If they could push for anything they would have done it for what they already 100% control not for something they can never control and will be so controversial.

Not to mention that the weak US regime has not even been capable of preventing the world from dumping the dollar which is far more important than your

I think you responded to the wrong thread here. Nobody here was talking about shittokens or Epstein in this thread....

How do you know that kind of law will work anyway outside the U.S.?

The US could effectively force investors in other countries to accept their fork because they control 95% of the price of Bitcoin. I mean, sure, they don't "have to" use the US fork, but if they want to sell their BTC for something, that's what they would need to do.

[...]
Yes, Uncle Sam could tell the big miners based in the USA that they have to van all Iranian UTXOs. Or tell then to accept only KYC'd UTXOs. And the USA based miners would likely comply.

Nobody is talking about miners per se. If you changed the Bitcoin codebase, you could even do away with miners altogether by getting rid of PoW. Miners have nothing to do with this topic.

Please stay on topic. It sounds like you should create a new thread for yourself and discuss your issues.

[...]
But let's play like they would want to ban bitcoin:
[...]

The OP is not talking about "banning" Bitcoin, it's talking about the ability for a government to force the code base to be changed, thus controlling it.

And yes, they can't stop every single individual on the Internet from using whatever code they want to use, but they can surely determine which codebase you need to use in order for your Bitcoin to be worth real-world money, i.e. exchanged for goods and services.

"Go ahead", they would say, and use your ideologically "pure" Bitcoin codebase. Have fun. But it would not be the thing called "Bitcoin" in the USA and its allies, and it would not have any serious market value.

I agree there is no sign the US or anybody else wants to do this, but that wasn't the point of this thread. The point is that saying, "Bitcoin can't be taken over by governments" is bullshit.

Yes, they don't want to... BUT THEY CAN.

Let's theoretically assume that Michael Saylor, Elon Musk and also the biggest holders of Bitcoins, like exchanges, decided to support this idea what you are telling to us. How beneficial will this be for these companies?

I have no idea. That wasn't the point of this thread. The point is that if they did find a reason, they could change Bitcoin if they wanted to.

Also, the congress can't make the centralized fork to be called Bitcoin, the ledger is only updated by nodes that accept blocks under their chosen consensus rules. Doesn't matter what kind of power the US has, they can't force other countries to ban official Bitcoin and declare a new fork as the original one, that's simply impossible.

They wouldn't need to force anybody to do anything. The choice would be simple: on the US fork, your bags are worth $10,000 and on the non-US fork your bags are worth $1.29. The choice is yours. Use the one that benefits from the US+allies financial system, or use the other one.

Second, we don't need the support of Binance, Coinbase, and others for BTC to be number 1, and the last time I checked, all these organizations adopted BTC to get their own cake.

Um, yes you do  . Without the major brokers, apps and ETFs, Bitcoin's investors would drop by 99%, and the price would drop even more.

You may not know that President Trump acknowledged BTC because he got a favor from it when the institutional banks restricted him from using his funds during the campaign, and he used BTC. Despite this, if he chooses to support the BTC fork, he hasn't learned his lesson.

Yep, and Trump owns about $.5 billion in BTC, reportedly. There's no sign that he feels like taking over Bitcoin's codebase.

But he could, and there's nothing the Bitcoin "hard cores" could do about it.

And insofar has the US government could force a change to the Bitcoin codebase for almost all of its users, the idea that "Bitcoin can't be taken over by governments" is... bullshit...

Naturally, if the fork BTC is create an get the attention of other countries, that's fine, but the use of bullying is out of the question.

Sadly, I would say the same thing only a few years ago. But we recently invaded Venezuela in order to steal their oil, so who knows what's possible now.

And keep in mind that countries like the US don't need to send actual missiles to places in order to get them to do what they want. They could just threaten things, both military and economic, or do sanctions, or tariffs, or whatever.

[d5000]

I think a single government, even the US one, cannot control Bitcoin, if we take out completely irrelevant (because of how unlikely they are) scenarios like "the US buying all/most Bitcoins into their strategic reserve" or something like that.

The "trademark" issue imo would also be irrelevant. The "real Bitcoin fork" would then simply be assigned a "neutral" name like "Peer to Peer Coin" or "Decentral Coin" on US exchanges, and 96% of the world population would have a good laugh about the MESA-style IQ of the US government and their citizens, because of course that would give competitive advantage as a gift to ETFs and other financial actors outside of the US, because they don't have to obey that rule. No more "crypto capital of the world"

Of course the US could ban Bitcoin trading or mining just like China, but that also would strengthen P2P exchanges (if they ban even that, they'd get a serious conflict with their trademark of being the Land of the Free) and again, to businesses outside of the US.

Bitcoin may drop a bit due to such movements, but not by much. It may be an excellent opportunity for China for example to re-think about their crypto restrictions.

But don't completely disagree with the OP. A group of powerful governments (e.g. those obeying the FATF rules, OECD, G20, or even only US+China+India+EU) could indeed put restrictions in place which could seriously harm Bitcoin. That's the FATF compliant fork scenario I have outlined in another thread and which would be mainly an issue if these countries accumulate large Bitcoin reserves and thus can threaten to dump ~3-5 million BTC at once.