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Comment by sprafa | Hacker News Reader

You cant. You realise that’s just not possible right? Bitcoin is a protocol at this point. That’s like saying “time to shut ftp down”.

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Disclaimer: pro-bitcoin maximalist.

I believe you are wrong. Bitcoin is a decentralized network which is difficult to stop, but not impossible. Semi centralized networks like Kazaa and Napster are great examples. If you want another example of a completely decentralized network then applications that use gnutella are great examples, like bearshare.

In all cases, the legal arm of a few entities straight up discouraged the use of all these networks forever through extreme legal action and mass marketing. Remember the stories of people getting crazy fines for downloading a few songs? They didn't do that to punish that person. They did that to intimidate everyone else and it worked. As recent as 2010, people has been attempting to develop clients for gnutella. None successful at rebooting the network. To assume bitcoin is somehow immune to this is lunacy.

to play devils advocate, they've also been trying to kill torrents for almost 20 years now, with very little to actually show for their efforts.

The most impactful thing that I've seen was the rise of netflix and the ease of getting legally paid for content making torrents not worth the effort. With the splintering of streaming content into many different services, I'm drifting back to torrents and finding it as reliable as it ever was.

It's kind of funny that when a discussion about multiple players in an industry comes up, HN is often the bastion of competition. But when we talk about an industry like streaming content, too many people despise the fragmentation.

In most industries competition improves user experience.

You're thinking about this from a technology point of view, but not from a practical point of view.

All you need to do is make it illegal to convert bitcoin to fiat and vice versa. Bitcoin is used for speculation, and not as a currency. Having bitcoin without being able to use it is pointless, and the only way to use it right now is to convert it into a usable currency. Yes, people can use some shady offshore exchange, and risk major KYC issues with moving that fiat. The key point here is that very few people would do so. The price of bitcoin would crash, and that alone would stop being from wanting to buy it.

You don't know what you are talking about. Bitcoin can be exchanged for anything on for example El Salvador which makes it a currency, period. Therefore the rest of your rambling stands in error. Please educate yourself.

Could coordinated governments shut it down? By making it criminal to own could they send the price to close enough to zero it is no longer useful?

Shutting down Bitcoin isn't possible. Devaluing it is, by making it legally hard to convert it to large amounts of fiat.

As someone on a Bitcoin forum once said: When has the government banning something ever led to that thing becoming cheaper?

You're right, though, that money is probably a special case, because it is designed to have limited supply (or at least sound money like Bitcoin is), and its value is related to its velocity.

The government banning something that people want to use hasn't made it cheaper, but you can't use bitcoin, you can only speculate on its trading. If the government makes it difficult to trade bitcoin (for fiat), less people will buy it, and less money going in will also result in more money going out. It'll crash the price which will further dampen its demand.

You're an idiot, you can use bitcoin for anything. Again, please educate yourself before speaking. If I use bitcoin to pay for a sadwich, do I not have that sandwich by your logic since I cannot do anything with bitcoin? What about paying for a big mac in el salvador? That doesn't exist either?

When people say something like this, what do they think? You can exchange manually, you can exchange via offshore accounts and you can simply life in a country that does not hate everything they can't regulate. For a big portion of crypto users not much would change.

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