correct me if I'm wrong but people using bitcoin in oppressed countries will basically be rendered penniless by simply cutting off network access. source: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/the-technological-case-ag...
The hope of people who believe in a future switch to crypto as the monetary standard are hoping the technology is strong enough to withstand enforcement of laws against it, hoping that all the laws in the world won't be able to stop it.
Whether that happens remains to be seen, but it's important to understand that this is part of the hope and the goal.
A policy ban is also an implicit admission that the government's position on money and finance is weak - if the US bans bitcoin, that implies that the dollar can't compete against bitcoin on its own merit, without the enforcement of violence.
Every country with capital controls already does this.
Most of them (e.g. Egypt, Iraq, Bangladesh and China) hand banned or heavily restricted (e.g. India) crypto. The same way they restrict hard currencies. America has an open capital account, so the threat is less present.
> Both sides of the Bitcoin network would carry on working (although if there was an unequal divide, one side might be slowed so much that it became unusable). Let’s imagine this carried on for a few days or weeks before connections were properly restored. At this point we would have two divergent “branches” of the blockchain, which is not allowed. By design, there is no way to merge the branches, and Bitcoin will simply pick whichever of the two branches happens to be the longest. For the unlucky half, all transactions that happened during those days or weeks of network partition would be erased.