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Comment by hilux | Hacker News Reader

Do you really believe that banning cryptocurrency would be "easy"?

It would kill the ETF and all exchange. It would make paying ransom impossible. The value would plummet. It would continue to exist of course, but would be functionaly dead. Sounds easy really.

Ransom was paid before and will be paid long after crypto. It's just means to an end.

Banning math worked so great in the 90's with the cryptomunitions legislation.

Googling "cryptomunitions" just directs to your comment...

What is this "cryptomunitions" you're talking about from the 90s...?

Basically any kind of encryption. It was considered munition by the US government and fell under that category of export control.

Yeah, for real. Isn’t the entire point of cryptocurrency (or at least a key principle) to be resistant to censorship / centralized attempts to “kill” it? I don’t doubt that there is some damage that could be done to crypto as a whole by governments taking steps to “ban” it, but I don’t think we can put the toothpaste back in the tube here.

I suppose the highest leverage card that legislators could play to try to hurt cryptocurrency would be to put a stranglehold on the fiat currency on/off ramps (eg making businesses like coin base flat out illegal), but even after doing that peer to peer markets would survive (albeit likely after also taking some damage to user base, maybe).

If there was no easy way to exchange large amounts of FIAT for crypto and vice versa (other than peer trading with a person), that would effectively make crypto like any other form of tradeable unofficial currency. Gold bars or diamonds or krugerrand. Insofar as crypto is "just" digital cash, it'd still work just fine, but it would make it trickier to move large sums around for criminal enterprises - much like how you'd need to jump through laundering hoops to translate your suitcase of undocumented diamonds back into FIAT, if you didn't have a reasonable answer for how you came to have them.

It'd also put a dent in crypto as a perennial pump-and-dump investment scheme, which in the long run would probably be quite good for its ability to actually work for daily, legitimate use.

You ban the on ramps/off ramps

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