I don’t think there is much they can do, except shut down companies like coinbase. That would also just lose them tax revenue.
1: https://www.wired.com/story/technology-could-end-humanity-ho... 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYhEDxFwFRU
This would take many many many billions, not “many millions” as you said.
The daily trading volume for bitcoin is $64 billion.
Buying “many millions” worth of bitcoin would not achieve what you’re proposing.
>Buying “many millions” worth of bitcoin would not achieve what you’re proposing.
IIRC in 2019 "someone" supposed bough BTCs for about 100 million USD in a short time frame and it raised the price by several %. Its not the 100million that moves the market so much is the demand it creates when people see the price going up. No need to buy the bubble just manipulate the market into creating one.
Also 100 million may sound like a lot of money but for a large state this isn't especially if its printed anyway. And they can recover most by betting on falling prices when they let the bubble burst. The people who exits before the bust are the only people who actually have to be "paid" (they made profit) by the an attack. While those who stay in or join will lose everything in the end and cover most of the cost of the attack. Remember after the attack BTC would be almost worthless and the attacker would have sold it all while betting on lower prices. All the people who get liquidated indirectly payed for the attack. Everyone who holds BTC an bought it higher than the end price indirectly helped create the bubble.
You'd definitely need lots of money to do this but that doesn't mean it costs a lot in the end. Most of it is a zero sum game.
This is exactly what they would do. They would make it illegal to operate an exchange and go after foreign exchanges with threats against the banks that serviced them. At some you need to get your money into the banking system as government backed currency for it to be generally useful, and they could at least force that to be a multi-step, onerous, and less anonymous process (eg get crypto --> buy physical goods with crypto from the few people that accept cryto for payment --> sell physical goods to get actual money).
At some point this will not be true. See Weimar, Venezuela, etc...
The IRS at el. will be all over this in no time.
There is going to be an terrorist attack made using BTC as funds - a new patriot act and suddenly touching crypto makes you a suspected terrorist.
https://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/supervision-and-examination...
If I were to see such an RFP, I'd bid on it myself.
Scaling that to every taxpayer or even every taxpayer in the largest apartment in Boise would be impossible using the same techniques.
I hope you realize this is utter nonsense.
I think you underestimate how much pressure the US government can put and how centralized the web is.
If:
No legitimate business will accept Bitcoin.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit ban all mentions or advocacy of Bitcoin
All public Bitcoin exchanges are shut down.
This would severely curtail Bitcoin and likely actually cause a drop in value.
Yes it is probably impossible to ever get rid of something, but for the government, reducing something to a fringe can be beneficial and is definitely something they can do.
This also never chanced so its irrelevant Bitcoin is still as slow as on day one, if you wait for the same number of blocks before you consider it "final".
Sure, the entire ecosystem would take a hit, but also note that many US companies have actually bought Crypto, people recently bought crypto on margin, and, those who still own crypto, can exchange it outside $COUNTRY, and convert currencies.
But that would be good enough to kill it for almost all purposes. Unlike illicit drugs, there's very little natural demand for Bitcoin to motivate people to risk it if it were illegal, which cuts it off from deriving value from the legit economy. It's also not very stealthy, so it would not be very desirable for the illicit economy, either [1]. A network that only has die-hard ideological cryptocurrency dead-enders on it is dead for all practical purposes.
[1] Right now, it has some marginal use at the interface between the legit and illicit economies (e.g. dark net markets), but if it itself became illicit, I think that would stop.
And the underground economy is a rounding error, if BTC is relegated to the dark web, it will lose 99% of its value.
both can be bypassed with tor.