Well, consider the distribution of global btc hashrate by country over time: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/mining_map

Editorialized: https://cointelegraph.com/news/china-returns-as-2nd-top-bitc...

Even a fairly authoritarian society with strong incentives to crush cryptocurrencies (https://www.marketplace.org/2021/05/20/chinas-crackdown-on-c...) wasn't able to get hashrate, much less usage, to anywhere close to zero.

I guess I'm curious: what levers do you figure Western societies could deploy that'd be more effective than the Chinese approach? From my perspective, this state of affairs is a decent existence proof that fully eliminating cryptocurrency use is difficult even with access to authoritarian methods.

nb: above links don't include 2022 data and I couldn't quickly find that, so if that data affects the quality of the above argument I'd appreciate the correction

I like a lot of Scott 's writings, but this is a bad habit of his. If there's a point that contradicts his own, he'll pretend to address it while actually just skipping over it/downplay it's relevance.