Nobody is proposing banning blockchains. Cryptocurrency, however, is clearly more than just software in the way missile-targeting system is more than ones and zeroes.

Wild people think mathematics, cryptography, OSS, and free markets should be banned. No one is forcing anyone to buy/sell/hold crypto. It is completely voluntary.

A) please point where in my post I even came close to suggesting bitcoin should be banned.

B) even if I had said bitcoin should be banned, did I suggest anywhere that distribution of the software be banned?

For example, let’s accept the extremely problematic premise that I somehow said bitcoin should be banned. What that could mean is that I think the US (and other governments) should regulate any marketplaces that are currency on and off ramps for customers. Stable coins claiming to be backed by US dollars can be banned outright (easy) or that you have to register and the US government establishes an audit process to verify the claimed reserves / the software you’re using to control the stable coins (eg Tether is a highly suspect stable coin that’s likely another huge fraud). The US controls a lot of the world’s banking (not all) but they can also say that those banks aren’t allowed to support such systems and it’s citizens aren’t allowed to engage with unregulated stable coins. Correct me if I’m wrong but that’s an example of something the US could do to regulate / ban the coins without touching the software. That also doesn’t touch distribution of FOSS but places a significantly regulatory burden on the networks themselves. Additionally, by placing sanctions on these coins, the US currency is so ingrained they could theoretically ban coins from most of the western world. Finally, if they wanted to (and there may be national security reasons to not do it), they could also deploy meaningful compute resources to do a nation level attack to further undermine such networks by raising the transaction costs too high or doing 51% attacks (there’s no evidence that these networks are immune to 51% attacks from a nation state like the US). I think you’re really underestimating the power the US could wield to take down the running network (production instance) vs needing to ban the source code (much harder and not worth anyone’s time since I imagine the government learned their lesson with the war in the 90s about cryptography + the free speech implications it has).

So, in summary. You put words in my mouth I never said and then used that to draw the most absurd and weakest possible position from there. That’s the reason for the downvotes. My suggestion is figure out what got in your way of reflecting and figuring out what was wrong with your post (eg maybe in the future before reread the post you’re replying to to make sure they actually said what you think they said and if it’s ambiguous asking questions rather than making an assumption).

Your second edit makes it clear you failed to do that because you kept claiming that any down voters were supporting a position no one claimed around banning distribution of the bitcoin source code (or even binaries) and demanding that they provide support for an absurd position that was only voiced by you in the first place.

Downvotes and upvotes on HN should reflect the quality of the comment and not agreement/disagreement.