I have seen one to many "the government will stop #bitcoin using violence" posts. So I decided to write this handy story to explain how that works, or doesn't.

Let's time travel to the future and see how that went for them.

First stop, kill all the devs. This is easy since you are the government, killing people who've committed no crime is a specialty. The Nyms won't be a challenge at all. It isn't like half the people on the planet want to know who Satoshi was and can't figure it out.

What do you find? Tick Tock, next block.

OK so it must be the miners. Bomb all the mining facilities. We'll assume any government could actually bomb mining facilities across the entire globe without being invaded by the UN for unprovoked attacks on nearly every country on the planet. We'll also just assume every sha256 asic is in a mining facility.

What do you find? Tick Tock, next block. Might have taken 2 weeks, but there it is.

Okay so every node runner just fired up GPU mining. So now you need to destroy every GPU on the planet. This is getting silly, let's just say Thanos does that for them using the infinity gauntlet. He is the kind of stupid hippy who thinks all energy use no matter how useful is bad, he'd surely help end proof of work mining.

What do you find? Tick Tock, next block. Might have taken 2 full weeks, but there it is.

Turns out any general purpose CPU ever made can mine bitcoin, it just wasn't profitable with GPUs and asics around. Every car, every TV, every cell phone, every PC, every laptop, I've seen light switches with a CPU in them. Keep it simple, destroy every transistor on the planet.

What do you find? Tick Tock, next block. Might take a bit more than the 2 weeks for difficulty, but there it is.

Turns outs somebody likes bitcoin and remembers how tubes work. At least tubes are less common than transistors, go destroy all of them too.

We'll just pretend in this future than pen and paper hashing is somehow impossible.

This is all a list of easy tasks for any government. They are good at controlling what their citizens can access. After all, nobody ever smokes weed.

After that short and easy list of tasks, bitcoin is gone until some nerd rebuilds some of the tech you destroyed. Don't tell me you forgot to destroy all information on computing so they can't just start over? Problem solved.

Feel free to share with any government believers you run into.