Ditto for the claim that Governments cannot stop bitcoin.
It must be a semantics issue which you're hung up on with regard to this issue. Governments cannot stop Bitcoin. They can ban it or otherwise criminalize it but that won't stop it from being used. I guess the only way we'd know is to give it a whirl.
My definition of "success" is "it is used by many people for ordinary payments because it is cheaper/faster/safer than using a bank or credit card". That will not happen if it illegal to use it.
Since december, even a foreign tourist cannot pay for a hotel bill or meal in China with bitcoin. So the bitcoin project is already dead in China.
The Chinese government still allows trading inside the exchanges only because they feel that it is harmless. If they saw a threat there, they could easily close the exchanges, and block access to the network if necessary.
Again, I do not see how the blockchain could be maintained if the US government decided to ban bitcoin.
You really understood nothing on Bitcoin if you thought that its success depends on a random Chinese being able to pay for his meal with it. Nothing.
First, Bitcoin was never meant to be a system with which consumers all over the world recurrently pay for meals or other day by day expenses. It simply does not scale. Remember it is blockchain based, and thus "heavy" and relatively "slow". Many people in the world are not able to pay for their meals with gold: so what?
Secondly, the revolutionary aspect of Bitcoin is that it CANNOT be killed. You see how hard has tried the US to kill torrent, and how that played out? Even if there is a global ban, the protocol cannot be blocked effectively, (everybody should already be running Bitcoin through Tor anyway), and even if "they" (banks and govs) manage to destroy the last exchange on earth, OTC would still happen and probably a big part of the global black market would embrace Bitcoin as a consequence of this global ban. Bitcoins would still hold a value - we all know what kind of markups we have on illegal things.
Bitcoin's core values (decentralized and trustless) would remain un scattered in this global ban scenario . You seem to do not understand the huge implications of these two core characteristics of this game changing technology. In these times of surveillance, globalization and centralization, a technology like Bitcoin will simply NOT go away because it is SO important and SO empowering.
Probably the difference between you and us is that you are thinking in purely economical terms. Even in that case, it's pretty strange that you compare Bitcoin to a Ponzi or a bubble when there has been NO ponzis and NO bubbles in history that have behaved like Bitcoin. That argument could have been valid in mid-2011, now it's just a ridiculous way to embarrass yourself. Shoe me a "bubble" which have gone through three phases as Bitcoin did, with similar appreciation and deflation in each one of the phases, and I might listen. You will find none, because that's not how bubbles/ponzis work: they go up uP UP until they crash flat to the floor, to never recover.
But remember, Bitcoin is much more than a speculative vehicle or a micro-payment network. Bitcoin is freedom, and it's also a way to say fuck off to the establishment, regardless of the regulations/bans that might been put in place.
Don't underestimate that.
