If a government really wants to put you down, it will put you down. Simply outlaw btc and create a dedicated competent government structure to police the ban and watch what happens. The price will skyrocket for a while, but the volume traded/mined will plummet and people will be reluctant to use it, facing real, harsh punishment.
No one thought Black Friday for poker will happen, but it did happen in a snap of the fingers. Poker is never the same ever since.
"If the government" - right, but only in that country. You do realise there is more than one government, so volumes of trade won't completely plummet.
Harsh punishments? For using an outlawed currency? I doubt it. Unless you are in NK, but then again, they love btc.
And you do realise we are dealing with a form of currency? It is different to online poker. When judges in the U.K. discussed bitcoin and if it was outlawed the outlined a few issues.
First being, if you outlaw the currencies one by one, there will always be a replacement to them. Similar to the issues countries have with synthetic drugs like MKAT (and the replicas of it)
Secondly, cryptocurrency can be compared to genuine payment systems such as Paypal. When you digitally move currency on paypal, it was ruled similar to cryptocurrency, even though it was an entirely different currency. There was also issues related to prepaid giftcards, lets say you have a £20 Amazon gift card. Outlawing crypto could affect these forms of intangible products.
Especially if a crpytocurrency uses something like the $ as its value. Say someone starts a crypto, makes it identical to a cryptocurrency, but labels instead as a 20$ coin, rather that 1 btc.
I'll try to find this report when I am home tomorrow.
