Don't want to get into a retarded argument, but fwiw I'm not shifting goal posts.
Look back at what I said- I said BTC was "largely beyond the reach of government manipulation." What I mean is (unlike fiat), BTC is immune to a lot of the fuckery that governments can do with the fiat-based ecosystem we have now because of the reasons I already discussed. I stand by that, and I think it's pretty evident.
I keep saying "hard to manipulate" and you keep translating that as me saying "impossible to stop." I'm not saying you can't suppress BTC to the point that it is de facto useless. You can. What you can't do is easily inflate it, censor payments, use it to manipulate monetary policy, etc. It was specifically built to be a better form of currency than fiat, and it is.
The second part of your argument is that all those wonderful features BTC has are pointless if a powerful bad actor can simply "stop" BTC via various draconian efforts.
My response is that's a silly argument. A bad actor could do that to virtually any asset. It could do it to fiat, gold, anything.
You
are shifting the goalposts, just subtly. Your original point was that Bitcoin is "largely beyond the reach of government action," which implies practical resilience, not just theoretical design properties. Now that the usability and accessibility angle has been challenged, you're retreating to "well, the ledger is still immutable and the supply is fixed." Sure, but that was never the part in dispute.
Yes, the chain can't be inflated, and yes, it's harder to tamper with than fiat. Nobody's arguing otherwise. The point is that none of that matters if governments can make it economically impractical to transact or convert. A currency that's technically alive but functionally unusable is not a superior form of money in any meaningful real-world sense.
Saying "but governments can suppress anything, even gold or fiat" is not the strong counterpoint you think it is, it actually concedes mine. If the ability to use the asset depends on the tolerance of the state, then the supposed independence of Bitcoin is conditional, not inherent.
Gold works
because it has thousands of years of embedded economic visibility, infrastructure, and legal precedents. Fiat works because governments
enforce its use. Bitcoin's
entire value proposition is supposed to be that it doesn't rely on those conditions.
So if your fallback position is: "Well, governments could render Bitcoin de facto useless if they want to." Then you've already admitted to its core weakness: Bitcoin is only "beyond the reach of the state" until the state actually decides to reach.
That's the contradiction in your argument. My interpretation from your post (and other crypto bros') is that you're selling Bitcoin as sovereign-resistant money while acknowledging that sovereigns can shut down its practical usability.
It probably says something about BTC when the level of argument against it involves theorizing the largest national government in the world putting its entire weight on it, catastrophic demand destruction, acts of God, etc.
We're in an investment thread, has anyone ever argued against something by saying "lol dude your TSLA buy is retarded, the government could shut off the NYSE and criminalize stock trading tomorrow and then what?" I'm betting that's not the usual level of discussion.
No, it says something about BTC that you have to retreat to theoretical design purity instead of practical survivability. When people point out that Bitcoin's value depends on liquidity, accessibility, and legal tolerance, the defense is basically: "Well, they'd have to actually stop people from using it."
Yes, correct. That's the point. Currencies don't live or die on immutability, they live or die on whether people can use them without getting crushed for doing so.
And the Tesla comparison doesn't land. If the NYSE shut down tomorrow, every major government, corporation, pension system, bank, and economic institution in the world would be in a systemic crisis. That's why it's not a realistic scenario, because the system is
deeply integrated into the rest of the economy.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, isn't integrated. It has no sovereign backing, no legal mandate, and no obligation from anyone to accept it. That's why a government crackdown is relevant: because the government doesn't need to destroy the global economy to disrupt Bitcoin, just the on/off ramps and the pipes.
The fact the argument keeps circling back to: "Well they’d really have to go hard to break it!"
Instead of: "Here’s why it remains usable even under pressure,"…is telling.
If the only time Bitcoin's advantages matter is in a hypothetical world where the most powerful institutions on earth politely choose not to interfere, then the sovereignty-resistance pitch is just marketing bullshit, not reality. Bitcoin doesn't need acts of God or total state collapse to fail. It just needs loss of liquidity and legal friction.
agree.
