The space has moved past this risk for a lot of reasons, to start. And it’s hard to understand I think in light of modern (relative to pre-2018/19) widespread mainstream adoption.

But, a long term protection for BTC when it was smaller and tbh anyone’s guess how it would turn out (still is IMO), was: who are you going to haul into senate hearings, court, cryptography export control violations, whatever over BTC?

This happened ample times in the recent past before BTC with digital money attempts and cryptography projects. It’s happening now with mixers on btc and ethereum. It was a real risk to BTC in its own way.

With BTC then and now, there was no real leader though. There were important core devs and industry leads, but no one held true sway like, say, Vitalik did with eth early days.

So it wasn’t so much a firm “did something wrong” risk for BTC’s founder, but more of a concern that the US govt had taken very heavyhanded measures against many similar projects to BTC. As there was no one to target in BTC’s case, this protection played a large role in its early push into staying power.

Also going to color this with CIA had the lead dev at the time visit them to discuss it in 2011. So there was certainly some real sustained attention to it from the start.