Lex Fridman interviewed Ray Dalio where Dalio doesn't outright say "governments will kill it" but definitely suggests it. Lex Fridman also interviewed Michael Malice and Yaron Brook where Yaron Brook essentially expressed the same thing. I was under the impression I saw a Fridman interview with Paul Krugman where Krugman expressed the same sentiment but I'm having trouble finding it. I know Paul Krugman has expressed similar sentiment in other contexts.

I think what these folks don't understand is that by the time Bitcoin, or some other cryptocurrency, becomes successful enough for governments to step in, it's probably way too late for them to effectively shutter it. One country (the USA, say) might be successful at "outlawing" Bitcoin, or other cryptocurrencies, but I find it doubtful that all, most or even a substantial portion of them will. If a government does ban it, then this gives an advantage to all neighbors and eventually they'll be coerced into using it because the world will move on. If they did manage to ban Bitcoin, then are they also banning other cryptocurrencies? Are they banning the underlying algorithms?

People were having very similar conversations at the advent of Napster and mp3s, though obviously the stakes were way lower.The big players tried to stamp their feet about how they would be bankrupted by theft. Artists came out of the woodwork to blame their fans for stealing their content on p2p sites. Then, the world moved on. Independent artists have way more options to make a living or grow a fan base than ever before. There are some other monoliths, like iTunes, and, of course, some big players did go out of business or had their monopoly crushed. People are more than happy to pay for music. They're not happy about paying for what they don't want to hear, paying exorbitant prices or, in my opinion, having high friction to pay, but people don't fundamentally care about shelling out a couple bucks for music they like.

The conversation should have been about providing value to consumers, instead the big players wanted to talk about theft. The world, for the most part, just basically ignored them and the winners in that arena provided value to their customers and were rewarded for it.

Also, to a certain extent, we had these conversations about crypto fundamentals,, and shipping "munitions" by downloading GPG across country boundaries.

Robert Breedlove makes some of these counter-arguments on another Lex Fridman interview.

There's an idea that these types of discussions about governments banning Bitcoin are kind of from a place of privilege. These folks sit at the summit of academic, political or financial success, so they don't see what issues Bitcoin solves as they kind of have a "works for me" attitude and, where they don't, they have a toolset of working within governments and regulation that is so orthogonal to the roots of Bitcion that they can't really understand how it could be successful.

Listening to these folks, I have the same incredulity as when I heard about big music companies, Metallica or other shills talk about Napster and piracy. It seems pretty obvious to me that Bitcoin has a lot of potential (as I saw with sharing music on the Internet) and it's disheartening to hear all this FUD. I guess the conclusion is to keep calm and keep building. If history is a guide, eventually the tools that provide value to people will win out and these folks will just fade into obscurity.

Relevant reading: