The serious players know damn well they won't have anything lasting if they don't play ball with the governments.
Destroying decentralization is not honest, it is selling out. And it is exactly what I expect them to do. A ponzi failure could possibly be a cover for making the transition to government control. It may be disguised as "proof-of-stake".
To what extent have you tried to analyse your own biases about governments? The usual short summary among Libertarians on this forum seems to be: "they're basically evil and should be kept to a bare minimum". Ditto Anarchists and Voluntarists. Even the Zeitgeist people don't seem too keen on allowing mere humans to be in charge of anything. However, the incentives that apply to governments at the individual and group level seem to be the same as the ones applying to everyone else:
-Some hunger for power and/or comfort, and various subjective needs. Money seems to be a great enabler for many things, regardless of employment sector.
-Intellectual energy conservation, and the resulting dogmatism, principles, and belief systems. Mental plasticity burns a shit-load of energy. Once a person or group "figures out how the world works", they face a decision: keep burning energy by adjusting that model whenever pressure is applied, or conserve energy by accepting it as good enough?
Now, unless you use a fundamentally
different model of person for government employees versus non-govt people, why should the game theory be any different? Granted, incumbent power structures tend to have various monopoly resources at their disposal, such as a giant police force or a system of laws, but I see the potential threats as unconvincing.
Could you explain the reasoning (or lack of reasoning) that an evil government would follow by co-opting or seeking to destroy Bitcoin?
Competition and greed are not the problem, rather it is the power vacuum that enables centralizing power. The government bureaucrat doesn't know how to compete in a granular market.
Governments, cartels, and monopolies exist because there is a power vacuum that can't be dominated by more granular competition. (Will write another time about why granular yields better fitness and less waste)
Those vested interests will always squash or co-opt any decentralization (movement or technology) which threatens to make granular competition dominant.
The
World Without Web would have occurred if key scientists at DARPA had not "lied through their teeth". The vested interests have fought back on many fronts, e.g. outlined in revelations from Snowden.
But they are still losing the war overall, as every time they shut something down, the hackers make it stronger. Thus I think they are going to lose the electronic currency war, but it is possible there will be two: the Bitcoin-morphed government currency and a hackers' currency. Most people use the government sites, e.g. Facebook, Google, etc.. The hackers have decentralized hangouts, e.g. Git, Mercurial.
I believe the hacker culture will spread and it is taking over the future economy. So steady growth of the hacker coin would be fine with me.
You must have a different definition of anarchy than I do.