So ... Can Goverment stop Bitcoin ?

[TheBomber999]

Nothing can stop Bitcoin

[Beliathon]

Short answer no.

Long answer hell no.

[practicaldreamer]

The difference with BTC and torrent downloads is that if I download the Beatles discography I save myself, what, £150 ?

If I download 1 btc from circle, the bitcoin protocol is into me for £250  

Big difference there in how the public are gonna view this thing.

Govt. can't stop it - but could easily render it null and void to the masses.

It needs a killer app - a bona fide raison d'etre - for the people. Something that will motivate them to make the effort. Cos it is an effort, when it can otherwise be done effortlessly with fiat.

Then govt won't be able to stop it.

I'm pinning my hopes on OpenBazaar - decentralised markets.

[r3wt]

I have seen countless posts claiming that the government can/will ban bitcoin. What I have never seen is a post stating how it could be done. Until someone can demonstrate how it could be done I will continue to ignore those sophomoric musings.

Theoretically it can't be done except through some lesser known, or impractical, or very expensive attack vectors:

a 51% attack(costly), a FRONT Attack(next to impossible, and costly), or shutting down the entire internet(impractical). These are the unlikely the scenarios. Likely scenarios would be banning bitcoin mining, and seizing mining equipment.

[beginner_x]

Unplug the internet cable, then you can stop bitcoin. Else? You can sell huge amounts of bitcoins, prices start to drop after some point, investments vanishes and people start to hate about bitcoin. You can shutdown/slowdown lots of exchange site by stopping deposits to banks. You can block bitcoin marketing sites, so nobody can make any shopping via bitcoin. We can put sthg more to the list.. These can be precautions. 

But we have already an example with bitcoin, if you try to stop it - it will become the part of illegal economy.

It is easier to follow people in these conditions, lots of us writes about coins in our twitter, facebook, .. or forum pages. We are using banks for deposits /withdrawals to bitcoin exchange sites. So every goverment can monitor their people, this is mostly what they want.

[Bitmore]

I think that it not only can't be stopped, but that any government that tries to ban it will only be handicapping their economy long term.
This could change the world, as long as private property rights and individual liberty prevails.  
A martial law scenario, brought about by some disease (Ebola) or world wide economic crisis or collapse or world war are the only realistic possibilities of stopping this.

[btcxyzzz]

They can slow it down, but blockchain idea is eternal. Slowly, blockchain will prevail, but it sort of come parallel with spiritual expansion of common people.

[jambola2]

Yes and no.

They can basically shut down every company accepting/using it and fine/prison every average user. They can try to take down as many sources of the Bitcoin client.

They can basically make it impossible for any development, and any usage by all but the most determined.

They can make Bitcoin worthless, but they cannot stop the few dedicated miners from mining and sending amongst each other.

Technically Bitcoin is unstoppable, as many others say, but practically it is stoppable.

[cryptworld]

It is the great things of bitcoin
nobody can stop bitcoin
they can ban it, but it is impossible to stop it

[rigdeer]

It is the great things of bitcoin
nobody can stop bitcoin
they can ban it, but it is impossible to stop it

Agree with you seriously,of course they can't,if they can ,they have done it already!

[pitham1]

They can make the consequences of using bitcoin severe.
For example - The Bangladesh central bank warned that bitcoin users could be jailed for 12 years under anti money laundering laws.

[Kluge]

I really don't see an outright ban happening (in the liberal West, anyway). Governments are sneakier than that, with more restrictions placed on what they dislike (or are indifferent toward) each year - but restrictions which may not be obvious. Net uhhhh... non-Neutrality poses a major risk, where ISPs in some countries do already cripple bandwidth permitted to IP addresses not in a "fast lane whitelist." When whitelists are involved, shutting down cryptocoins is more viable, even if cryptocurrencies aren't the target, just collateral damage. It may result in special "fast-lane VPS" companies (where they're basically just subleasing their "fast lane" license with the major ISPs), where they'd sell (likely at a huge premium over current costs) service to NFPs, generous individuals, and corporations for transaction and block relays for the good of the network. This would likely cause a drastic decline in the number of full nodes operating and may lead to service degradation for those using full clients. It may also pose a security risk insofar as a weak relay infrastructure could allow the few remaining relays to operate on a transaction whitelist or blacklist, effectively allowing them to control who can use Bitcoin, possibly even charging for tx relay capability if there're high-enough costs associated with running full nodes.

Service disruption through ISP QoS could also come from arbitrarily increasing latency between p2p connections, which would disrupt the currently fast and robust flow of the transaction queue as well as decreasing mining profitability where implemented. None of this would kill Bitcoin, but it would make it more difficult to use and could possibly cause financial losses in cases of time-sensitive transactions (and mining). Similarly, a "great wall" would be a PitA for full users to deal with, but Bitcoin would still work.

In pretty much every serious attack possibility, the best counter-measure is a decentralized mesh Internet returning the Internet to the "Wild West." It's definitely possible to set this up right now... if you have unlimited money. The tech's still not at the right price for the specs. More importantly, ideal bands're largely owned by corporations unwilling to lease at reasonable prices (if at all) or are otherwise allocated to stupid, irrelevant purposes. The major mobile companies have some excellent bands available to them, but local and regional WISPs basically have ~900MHz or go fuck yourself... the .11ah standard might be the needed improvement, though, if it can actually do what some are claiming. Right now, WISPs have the option of uselessly low-frequency signals (high latency, abysmal throughput), 900MHz (which can't carry much data as-is -- not nearly enough to be competitive), or uselessly high-frequency signals (abysmal signal penetration, while 2.4GHz has poor penetration and is terribly crowded by home/office routers, where WISP deployment would probably be disruptive). .... ahhh, damn... what was the topic?

[Beliathon]

Unplug the internet cable, then you can stop bitcoin.

Surprise! Bitcoin can be sent via SMS text.

[KIRAZ]

I don't think there's anyway to stop bitcoin protocol unless the cut electricity and Internet.
Even if they blocked something up bitcoin can easily hop to other channels.

[fulgurite]

as Bitcoin is getting it's popularity and acceptance level, it sounds a bit difficult to stop it's growing unless some shocking incidents happen 

yeah, and even shocking incidents happen, it will just in its downturn, it will not die,new thing is not easy to get out of people's sight.

[BADecker]

There are only two ways government(s) can stop Bitcoin. Make the whole world into some form of communist nation or dictatorship. Shut everything down, even themselves.

The second one, shutting everything down, might work temporarily, but it wouldn't last.

[nextblast]

I saw a lot of posts , some people says they can't , other says they can . (nah , not shutdown the whole internet)
Since it's Peer to peer (P2P) can't  ISP close some ports or something like that so the wallets don't work ? I'am not sure , just asking , if Anyone know , share your knowledge guys

Government can surely ban btc inside its country, like baning drugs, weapons, etc. Especially in countries like North Korea, where Internet is banned, there's no space for btc to thrive.

[cbeast]

Government can stop Bitcoin by respecting privacy, backing money with gold, and Unicorns.

[erre]

Why everybody states that a 51% attack is unpractical/costly for a government?

They only need to seize ghash.io, or they could just point all universities data center to btc for a couple of hours...

Not so costly or unpractical, a single fighter jet cost considerably more.

[Daniel91]

No, I don't think so.
Anonymity and decentralization is our the best protection.
There are no central entity, known CEO, office or anything solid that any government can intervene and stop us.
Everything is virtual, so if they want to stop us, they can just try to stop Internet