That is the whole point of bitcoin. There is no entity that can prevent you from using it.
Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
Anyone can say you are not allowed, but enforcing it is impossible in practice.
I feel that's a geek dream far outside of reality we live in.
Making it illegal to adopt or trade Crypto is possible and feasible. If your employer doesn't pay you in crypto,your landlord and bank and grocery store and public transport and health services don't take Crypto, then you're basically limited to the black market. Which tends to work well enough without complications of Crypto.
People envisioning dystopian future that needs Crypto, severely underestimate the ability of that dystopian future to prevent Crypto. Basically, their imagination of dystopian future is limited and naive. Humans can get bad and nasty and societies can get scary and Crypto is not the way out of such for ordinary citizens. Paper money, maybe. But Crypto requires so much equipment through so many telltales with so many ways for regular humans to reveal themselves accidentally that it's a totalitarian regimes' wet dream.
Worried about dystopian future? Go out and vote, run for a city Councillor, participate in your local school board, educate and spread awareness. Be a political activist. Engage others, be persuasive and empathetic. Promote understanding and openness and getting along. Be the change you want to be - open dialogue with neighbors, fellow parents at school, teachers, city service people - instill the habit and values of open society. Bitcoin is not going to prevent the dystopian future or save you from it, and your noble death on the altar of bitcoin will not move the needle for anybody else.
Just as we've seen; they can regulate the on/off ramps between local currency and crypto.
If you've got a method to turn meaningful amounts of BTC into USD without being subject to KYC regulations; then the US government is probably already building a federal money laundering case against it.
You give evil too much credit.
I do not need to buy cash since I buy what I can with lightning, which is in no way impractical for me.
As long as you still need fiat currency to buy regular goods -- or pay taxes -- entities can make it difficult for you to use cryptocurrencies. If you have to convert cryptocurrencies into something real-world in order to live, governments can make that difficult for you.
I am just not convinced that we will get to a place where you can live solely (or nearly solely) in a cryptocurrency world, without needing fiat.
This is a common marketing claim which doesn't hold up if you think about it even a little. It's like saying that no entity can prevent you from saying something because you define “prevent” as whether there's a cop following you around ready to punch you if you open your mouth — almost all real-world censorship happens after the fact or relying on third-parties, and Bitcoin is no different in that regard.
Bitcoin can trivially be blocked or tracked at the network level. If you have a hostile government, consider the risks of connecting to a well-known network if they've banned it.
If Bitcoin is not completely banned, a government can require everyone to report transactions for taxation or other purposes. That means that your ability to evade punishment for a transaction comes down to whether all of your earning and spending can be done outside of the country without leaving a trace of that network activity, and that you and everyone you make transactions with will never be compromised (think about how would you know?) or cooperate with the authorities (businesses will share their records because they have a legal presence which can't ignore local laws). Similarly, if you want to actually spend that money you have to be extremely stealthy to avoid the authorities wondering how you're spending more money than you appear to make, hope that someone you know never develops a grudge or is coerced to tell the authorities that you're, say, living lavishly on your trips outside the country, etc.
If _any_ of those points aren't true for you, Bitcoin is not safe to use — especially because the public ledger gives the authorities a huge data source of all of your historic activity so you have to consider not just whether they're watching you at the time of an illicit transaction (as is the case with cash) but also whether you or the the other party will at any point in the future have your wallet IDs leaked.
(Yes, I've heard of tumblers. Ask yourself who in this situation is going to risk being charged as an accomplice to the worst crime anyone else using that tumbler is involved with — or whether the police are running the tumbler to get criminals to self-identify their intent to do something illicit.)
The underlying concept to understand here is that sovereign states control their territory. If you live under an abusive government, you are only safe to evade their rules to the extent that the government is weak — if so, just use USD like everyone else. If not, all of the options are risky and there's no magical thinking about technology which is going to materially change that … but almost all of it opens up new avenues for fatal mistakes which are hard to recognize until after the fact.
Even then they cannot seize it, and a transaction script is already in place to send to a trusted address if no spend within a certain time.
I don't give a fuck about living lavishly. I will be living free or dead.
The problem with this is the fringe libertarian fantasy of thinking that you can be a society of one. It's not just you reporting transactions but everyone you do business with, and these things chain — e.g. maybe you can do work under the table for a while but then you want to buy things like cars or houses and your lack of visible income catches up with you, or someone you do business with gets caught and opts for a lower sentence by identifying their partners. The level of risk and lifestyle restrictions mean this isn't appealing for most people, especially given the entirely philosophical benefits.
What if they just turn off the external internet?
They can prevent it. It doesn’t matter if you can get around it. When no stores take it it’s worthless to you.
No government is capable of this. Even North Korea has people smuggling phones over the border. A single cell or satellite connection that can sustain 2-3 KB/s is all you need to keep the rest of the country connected.
How are you paying for that sat-phone? That's expensive, so you need real money and amounts of it which are beyond, say, the average North Korean. If you have a way to launder that money and conceal it, why do you need Bitcoin?
What are you doing to get Bitcoin? Again, you need hard currency which the average North Korean doesn't have access to.
Who are you using those Bitcoin to transact with? Nobody in country can use it legitimately so you're restricted to the black market and very riskily exposed since your full history is available to the government if they ever identify you or someone you're doing business with. It's much safer to use a suitcase of foreign currency since in that case you're at least only at risk for the amount of cash the police find on you at the time you're busted.
Tell me the last 5 lightning transactions I made.
Even if your opsec is perfect, any transaction partner can identify you.
The problem with the public ledger is that it is, well, public and permanent — maybe you're able to fly under the radar for years, but then your records turn up in an exchange's data breech or an investigation into the services you're using to launder real money, etc. and then your full history is revealed detailing exactly how much money you weren't paying in taxes.