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Sort of. The difficulty comes in the spending. The government can easily ban conversions from crypto to fiat, and immediately all the speculators will sell. The last crash was supposedly caused by someone trying to sell just 9000 BTC. This will drive the value towards zero. You won't be able to spend it at any legitimate merchants. The illegitimate merchants will not take it at anywhere close to today's value. So yes, but also no.

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> just 9000 btc

For context, that is nearly half of a billion dollars worth, it is hardly a small amount. Try selling half a billion dollars of anything on short notice and you'll observe similar market reactions. I think that the fact that the market swallowed up that kind of volume is indicative of Bitcoin becoming more mature in a market sense, not less.

The government has banned file sharing, marijuana, prostitution, etc., and all those things still occur at billions of dollars of value scale. They occur because those transactions derive value for participating parties.

Any nation state that bans crypto assets just pushes development and innovation out to the more accepting countries. And so you have game theory against other competing nation states, where if you ban it and they don't, capital flight occurs and you end up losing in the long run.

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