Drugs are illegal, yet nearly everyone is using them.
You cannot compare something you could purchase in a completely anonymous way to something that has a permanent, irreversible ledger and does not forgive you for any little mistake.
Anyone can run a node & operate as a self-sovereign individual outside of government control. Anyone can download a wallet & accept Bitcoin outside of the system. The cost to enforce to physically stop people from doing these things - it's far too high.
You're talking about the cost to enforce this as if everyone around the world is using Bitcoin at this point. The number of people actually supporting
Bitcoin and not just its price bumps is very, very small. Bitcoin regulation would not make a big fuss right now, because the number of people using it is just too small for their voices to matter.
Anyone can download a wallet and accept Bitcoin outside the system, yet you're doing it through the Internet that your gov is permanently monitoring. You could argue Tor is a solution to that - well, trust me, it's quite hard to do everything the right way. And if everyone used it through Tor and mixers/CoinJoin, you would see an immediate opposition from the governments. The only reason they have stopped the Bitcoin oppression is that they found a way to monitor probably more than half of the blockchain events. People aren't using it the right way, so they can easily link events to identities. A heaven of control and surveillance for the govs.
I'm curious to find out how Bitcoin would work in a world where Internet is decentralized and the massive businesses of Internet providers give away their power to the people, because that's what it takes if we wanted Bitcoin not to be regulated or banned.
Not gonna happen. Even if it will, it won't take too long before someone else takes the lead. If politics fall, mainstream media may take the control handle because it already has a significant influence over people's behavior and thoughts. Decentralize everything and just wait until someone calls out "the significant increase in crimes". The average person would listen to that rather than supporting a digital currency they don't even understand.
The world's largest powers will never let a decentralized currency take over their controlled fiat currency.. hence why CBDCs are gonna be a thing soon. The average person will more than likely jump straight into the CBDCs boat, which will obviously be so much easier to understand and use than cryptocurrencies. The digital Euro or USD will probably have a very fancy and intuitive UI as well.
It should be our right to choose the money we prefer & have transactional privacy - natural law. You cannot truly regulate Bitcoin. Especially as more people start using Lightning, CoinJoin etc. They would have to turn the internet off - simply won't happen.
Monero has faced a huge oppression from governments
and online platforms. Yet, no rioting and no big voices complained about it. If the government found it's quite hard to monitor what happens through it, they decided to slowly cut the thread and let only non-private blockchains function the way they're supposed to function.
Governments merely provide protection services & force far too much taxation to pay for it. Bitcoin is free market capitalism. It will drive innovation & growth, not stifle it. How much are their protection services worth to you each year? I bet you a privatized version of all their services would easily compete with taxation/inflation/debt/QE/stimulus/bond buy backs - theft at the tax payer goes on & on. Personally I think all their services are worth a few thousand bucks a year. Politicians are wasteful & have no accountability for anyones money. All they care about it is looking their best during their term. This system incentivizes debt & poor spending habits.
Well, here you just express your hate against the system we're living in. I hate it as well, it's a common point of ours, but it isn't really what we were talking about. I know politics are pretty much a scam, so is the fiat system, yet we realistically cannot have a decentralized governance. Even if Bitcoin has made open-source and decentralization more prominent, governments are still implanting backdoors everywhere. Even if the COVID tracking apps are supposedly anonymous, it's actually quite easy to find one's identity through them.
Having no governance would make this world a mess. If you're really thinking that one day this is gonna be a real thing, I hope you're not wrong but I don't think it could work out. The human nature wouldn't allow it.
It isn't a dream, it's here - anyone can use it. Bitcoin & internet empowers people like never before.
It may be here, but are you 100% sure you'd still be able to use it in the event of a crypto ban in your country, without getting caught? It may put the financial power in the people's hands rather than the government's, but as I said, it cannot make a change alone. We would first need to decentralize
everything. CBDCs are
way closer to our reality than Bitcoin taking over the control handle.
Not standing behind Bitcoin at this point highlights your lack of knowledge of the system. It is the closest thing we have to freedom.
Supporting Bitcoin doesn't mean pretending there aren't negative sides of it, nor does it mean that I have to truly support fairy tales. I'm just being realistic.
Bitcoin can be used pretty damn privately if you know how. It will only get easier. Look at Pheonix & Samourai wallet - both super easy to achieve decent privacy.
As far as I read, Samourai
isn't the best privacy-enhancing tool out there. And using CoinJoin/Whirlpooling/Mixer is useless if you do not study these things beforehand. You should take care of the
resulting change, you should take care of your fingerprints, of coin control and so on. The average person does
not have the right education and knowledge to know all this, so in the end it's not being used the right way by the majority of people. That is why Bitcoin is still alive as a
legal cryptocurrency.
No, CoinJoin does not make you anonymous by default.. nor does Monero. Back to the comparison you made between drugs and BTC, it's not as easy to achieve privacy with BTC as it is with drugs, the latter requiring pretty much just common sense.
KYL/AML is being used as a fear tactic.
Yet, it's still here years later. It still exists, and it's even more widespread than it used to be. Regulations are real, and skipping them
is a legal risk.