Crypto Is Antigovernment
Cryptocurrencies are bad for the environment. It’s an incredibly ineffecient way of processing transactions. It’s a bit like burning a forest as a way of keeping your neighbourhood warm. I say these when looking at the more popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum but to a degree, they apply to all of them.
Crypto also offers an avenue of transactions which are absent of any governing or financial regulatory systems. They rely on distributed parties agreeing whether transactions should proceed or not as opposed to a singular body which can authoritatively approve or deny a transaction.
Who owns crypto?
Whoever knows the private key is an owner. This trust model is very different to when you open a bank account or obtain a credit card. These systems rely on a physical and real life human to ‘own’ the credit, debt or savings in an account.
These systems have been in place since the bartering days of people. In some ways, this key differentiator is what gives crypto an edge over the traditional system. But know that if someone ever uncovers your private key, there are no systems in place for you to retreive your funds.
At the time of writing, the computing power needed to crack a 2^256 bit private key is too much, even for governments to try.
Why the government can’t regulate it
While it’s possible for governments to force large online crypto exchanges like coinbase and binance to demand every user on the platform have their identity verified and even sync financial transactions of the user with their tax information, the fact that a user can claim they had their crypto lost or stolen means it’s impossible to ever know if a user owns crypto or not.
Someone could be providing work or services to people without using these large crypto exchanges at all and be paid directly to their local offline wallet without any government ever learning about it.
There are certain freedoms the internet implicitly provides us with and we can use those to anonymise our true identity (true in the sense of someone existing in a government system and not deceased). It’s why media pirating and many other illegal activities are tough to police on the web without great law enforcement effort (e.g. darknet silk road).
Why the government can’t stop it
In a similar vain to P2P networking, crypto has the luxury of being a fully compatible technology with the way the web is built. It’s also owned by developers so they are free to change the underlying mechanism to how they see fit for requirement. An example of this is the ethereum move from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stack (PoS).
What it will take to stop it
It will take an anti-crypto sentiment and a number of bad / nefarious actors to take down many crypto exchanges and take over networks or introduce malicious code to take down these crypto networks.
E.g. if someone introduced a backdoor which meant they were able to guess the private keys generated for customers on exchanges, they would also be owners of all the wallets generated on an exchange.
Killing fire with fire as they say. There’s really no amount of government that could possible take place to authoritatively ban a distributed network like crypto, which is why people like it and why it’s anti-government.