I think bitcoin will not be banned in prigressive and civilized countries because now that would make opposite effect. Many governments would try to regulate bitcoins so that they could control it in a way. But in worst scenario if bitcoin was banned users would continue to use it anyway.
Not so, if you hard a country that came in and just went in right over the top with
punishments for bitcoin users of say 10 years jail it would be a disaster for the bitcoin community, most people using bitcoin would stop overnight and the rest of us would start looking for a new cryptocurrency with better privacy features while still fighting for bitcoin in public.
But you are right that banning bitcoin would have the
opposite effect that the government was aiming for, it would just bring more attention to something they would love to see just go away. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay!
Right, people will only live in fear when that time comes. It's image and name is ruined for those who only know Bitcoin for the first time. Let's take this scenario:
Australia bans the usage of Bitcoin. Of course the media will take the news because it is a big scoop and it will be aired across the globe causing global awareness on bitcoin Ang cryptocurrencies where the people who know nothing about Bitcoin will take Bitcoin as a bad thing and the youngsters will be influenced by bad imagery. That horrifying if the powerful people do that. Bitcoin will be like a drug and only few people will just use it.
It depends if the people is open minded in these things. We are in the era where the notions of beliefs and principle is washed away by the " top individuals" and we have no choice but to follow. This will be tough tho' ( mentally and physically ). If this time, we can call this bitcoins historical introduction, when that time comes it will be the dark ages of cryptocurrencies.
All these blocks of text can be summarized by the "Streisand effect"
The Streisand effect is the phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely, usually facilitated by the Internet.
SourceInstead of removing the bitcoin from the scene by burying it by making it illegal and putting a huge punishment, it will just increase the popularity of bitcoins instead.
I actually doubt that they will put huge punishments on this because it will just be more "hot" in the media and everyone will be wondering why is using bitcoins have a really huge punishment. They will have much more chance of researching about it then instead when the use of bitcoin only has a light punishment at first attempt, then a little larger punishment on second, and so on..
Back to my usual example, the use of drugs also have a huge punishment (of course "huge" is subjective) but almost everyone has a stash of weed especially on large countries. Like they say, it's only illegal if you get caught.