A steel man for a government capture: The government doesn’t even need to aggressively ban Bitcoin. Gentle, well-meaning regulatory clarity can accomplish the same thing just fine... Financial regulators can just give “guidelines” that bitcoin addresses need to be tied to identities to distinguish “legitimate bitcoin” from “black market bitcoin.” They already know from KYC who owns a lot of the addresses. They could require all wallets approved on platforms like iOS and Google Play build in a function with ID that signs a message from each address regularly. They will have a long, generous leniency for people to come forward and ID their addresses and they will be allowed to cash in on bitcion’s rising value and spend freely, while a few high profile cases of people who use black market bitcoin that has been “laundered” in coin-joins are prosecuted and their transactions will be linked to awful stuff like human trafficking and terrorism. Most people want to live, peaceful law-abiding lives, and a vast majority of bitcoin holders will comply and get wealthy rather than risk jail and social stigma. All the big energy companies that run the mining sector will eventually be required to only mine blocks from legal ID-verified addresses. Sure, there will still be a few anonymous pirate miners that will occasionally mine blocks with transactions from unverified addresses, but that will be rare so it will become increasingly difficult to even use the chain with “black market bitcoin.” While there are cypherpunk work-arounds that can keep an underground circular black market economy going with the coins minority that haven’t been captured that economy will be tiny and suspect, while the rest of world will hyper-bitcionize the “safe and legal” way. The governments of the world will be clear that bitcoin is an asset and not a currency, so they will regulate away the ability earn it directly or use it to buy things directly. Legally you save in bitcoin and then trade it for fiat when you need it. While the legal bitcoiners are getting rich and the increasingly few cypherpunk bitcoiners are being ostracized and demonized, the governments of the world will HODL. Increasingly the bitcoin reserves will back the fiat currency, so that no one will doubt that fiat has value. Just like they did on the gold standard they will create more fiat than the asset backing it so that the “satoshi value” of each CBDC dollar will slip over time, but at first they will be careful with this so the CBDC feels like it has real solid value. Then an emergency like a war or an economic crisis hits after Bitcoin is already neutered, so when major governments of the world issue a 6102-like order demanding that all bitcoin be turned over to the treasury for “safe keeping” everyone will comply. They will get lots of valuable fiat in return and all the freedom tech power of bitcoin gradually eroded so long ago they might not even remember that bitcoin once had these properties. After that the main chain becomes the property of central banks, and we are all back on fiat because the bitcoin standard failed the same way the gold standard did. Sure there will still be a few criminals and bitcoin bugs that have a couple hundred thousand BTC outside the system, but they will be irrelevant. This seems like a possible steel man for how they could “ban” bitcoin very gradually over a generation or so. Maybe the bitcoin underground would win in the end after the central banks ruin the bitcoin standard like they ruined the gold standard, or maybe cypherpunks would just spin up another currency because the bitcoin chain as as freedom tech was dead. Either way in this scenario freedom money “winning” would take so long that it won’t happen in my lifetime and likely not even my grandchildren’s lifetime.