Ray Dalio: Governments Will Ban Bitcoin

I can't see the US government—at least not the current administration—retroactively turning tens of millions of its citizens into criminals.

Companies have $50 billion worth of bitcoin on their balance sheets; it would be senseless to go after these companies.

Does it even need to be banned? If the fear is that it will become a mainstream alternative to government issued currency, pushing it back to fringe would accomplish the same thing, would it not? Simply associating cryptocurrencies with unsavory activities should be enough to make it radioactive to the average person. It probably wouldn't even take that much effort. A few high profile arrests of producers of child pornography and some human traffickers should do it. Have the media highlight the stories day and night for a couple of weeks. Once the association between cryptocurrency and pedophilia is made, the only people still willing to be involved with it will be those who are already deep in the shadows.

I can definitely see this happening either by declaring it illegal or going after the weakest link in the Bitcoin's system = cashing out.

The entire peacetime power of industrialized governments is their fiat currency. Without it, these governments don't even exist. No alternatives to fiat can be tolerated in the long term.

An easy solution would be to just ban crypto from being on either side of any regulated transaction. That would include cashing out, as that is a transaction from crypto to fiat currency. Depositing money into crypto would become unregulated (you have no recourse if you are ripped off), but that wouldn't matter - hardly anyone beyond darknet participants will want to bother at that point. Crypto can go back to being the currency of choice for buying weed or mdma...no one will care at that point, as fiat currency isn't threatened by drug deals.

Some people seem to think the size of the crypto market means it can't be smashed for yucks. No one who "matters" is staked out on crypto, these people can all be left to twist in the wind.

Crypto can be destroyed. Gold on the other hand can only be moved. There is no economical way to actually destroy gold, and obviously no way to create more of it. Gold will still be here when the last Beanie Baby unravels, when the last Hank Aaron baseball card turns to dust, and when the last ssd full of bitcoin falls apart in a landfill.