Topic: If governments block Bitcoin, does Bitcoin have no value? - page 5. (Read 565 times)

You probably mean if they illegalized it, because blocking/banning a peer-to-peer network seems unreal if you don't cut your country's internet connection. They've tried banning it, but failed.

The answer is no, Bitcoin has value as long as people believe it should. If I want to transact with someone oversea instantly, Bitcoin satisfies me a lot and thus, I evaluate it.

I've tired on reading US dollars in Bitcoin transactions... There are no dollars! Only bitcoins! Also, can you provide us your proof of these statements? Not an article that says exactly what you came up with.

That seems small to me. It could be true for drugs and guns, but an illicit activity is to evade taxes as well. I'd guess that lots of people evade their bank with Bitcoin.

IF it was possible for the government, or any establishment entitiy to censor Bitcoin, then yes, Bitcoin would lose its main value proposition. Censorship-resistance. BUT, show me how Bitcoin users could be censored from using Bitcoin to buy Heroine from the dark markets, or censor users from HODLing Bitcoin to hide wealth from their wives, or censor users from depositing Bitcoin to an online casino to gamble.

That is essentially the same random baseless numbers but with more words. The main reference of the wall of text is an article from 2012 which was the year when things such as Silkroad were popular. The other reference it uses is even worse. It is from 2018 and claims that the volume is $76 billion annually but their data is from 2009 until 2017! This is a ridiculous range which goes from $0 or $19.7k annually in 2009 to $3654 billion in 2017. I have no idea how they concluded that 76 is 45% of 3654!
The calculation is also seriously flawed because they are basically creating what they call "clusters" of users based on addresses and what they think is a link between them. They also don't stop at a certain tx that could possibly be an illegal transaction, they count all its descendants as illegal too.
It is interesting that on page 15 they claim to know how many bitcoin users there are in total without explaining how they come up with that number.

Basically their methodology is that they find some known illegal activities (such as coins seized by the government) then they move back from those transaction by making a wrong assumption that a lot of the parent transactions were also illegal then compute the sum total of those outputs and report it as all being illegal!

With Bitcoin's nature, it's not going to be easy to block, unless everyone goes back to the last century and stops using the Internet. Therefore, various blockchain coins are not so easy to be blocked, and the actual transaction value is also real. But Bitcoin's value is likely to be infinitely close to zero, since there are countless XX coins that are its enemies, and there is no essential difference between them. When there are countless kinds of XX coins on the market, as long as the time is long enough, the value will be infinite points.

I think this is where he got these numbers https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/17706/what-is-the-actual-use-of-cryptocurrencies

The authorities can actually track down these transactions if they really wanted to arrest someone behind these illegal activities. Bitcoin is traceable and with the help of chainalysis, I'm sure they could get bad actors.

Blocking Bitcoin is not possible. It's worth fighting against BTC when gradually the world is adopting it, the country that will block or illegalize BTC will just be left. China will not be able to stop it too.

IIRC the volume of Bitcoin that is known to be involved in illicit transaction is fairly small, I think less than 0.5%.

The value of Bitcoin partially comes from the fact that governments cannot block Bitcoin. You might be able to hinder your own citizens using Bitcoin by draconian laws. It'll be quite a difficult task to block it completely. Even if the exchanges were to be shut down, the decentralized exchanges would likely still operate as well.

I'm not sure the government does that and the government can't block Bitcoin, the government can only block bank transactions related to crypto, but that never happened.

Basically Bitcoin is not only traded in one country, Bitcoin can be accessed in all countries, not all government officials agree with the idea of ​​blocking Bitcoin, the proof: many officials/governments consider Bitcoin as a promising investment asset, not least the government secretly invests in Bitcoin, meaning: one or two countries completely block Bitcoin and another country legalize Bitcoin as a digital currency for exchange.

Conclusion: the value has no effect at all in this case, on the contrary the value of Bitcoin is getting higher.

Note: unless the government can do the blocking, if the internet and technology are destroyed on this earth.

I would agree about wanting to see some proof of those numbers. No references at all? I find it a little hard to believe that 46% of all BTC transactions these days are by illegal activities. I don't know if I agree with those numbers, but Bitcoin will always have value because I don't see every government blocking it. Personally, I don't see the US blocking Bitcoin.. El Salvador just made it a legal tender.. I don't see other free countries like Canada, United Kingdom, Australia..etc blocking it either. BTC won't be blocked in all countries so it will always have value.

You can't just use random numbers here, where is your proof of any of your claims for the percentages and amounts used in your claims?

And what's up with all these "what if" topics today from newbie accounts?

In Bitcoin-based transactions, about 76 billion US dollars of transactions are involved in illegal activities each year, accounting for about 46% of the total Bitcoin transactions. Almost a quarter of bitcoin users, and nearly half of bitcoin transactions, are illegal. Therefore, from a quantitative point of view, the use of Bitcoin is enough to become the target of attention of governments and international criminal police. If governments block Bitcoin, does Bitcoin have no value?