In one of my previous post, “Bitcoin & Cryptocurrency vs. PayPal & Other Centralized Payment Services which are scams” a curious Steemian @pujaisma commented this question which is the title of this post, and that’s why I made this post. I hope anyone reading this will find it interesting.


As we all know Bitcoin has some amazing features like “open, public, borderless, permission-less & decentralized.” So the whole idea of banning Bitcoin seems very complicated, but I will try my best to express my thoughts.


Before that, let us talk a bit about Fakebook. I remember when our local government banned Fakebook for a couple of weeks, which means the Telecommunication Ministry banned all our local IP addresses and because of that many people couldn't connect to Fakebook network from our country. When that happened lots of people couldn’t have access to it, however some people including me just installed VPN on our devices and had no problem having accesses. It was a bit difficult for people like My Mother and her generation, but it was no big deal for me or anyone below the age of 25. And btw government did this ban because they wanted to negotiate with Fark Muckerberz to give the government full access to spy on accounts of the citizens of our country, and in the end the deal was done, Fakebook decided that getting traffic to their site is more important to them than protecting the privacy of the people who brings them that traffic.


Now let’s get to our main issue, Bitcoin can’t be really banned, the existence of Bitcoin is here and it will continue to exists forever (wait, I’m still not sure what happens after the final coin gets mined, but the deadline is still more than 20 years from now on). But if anyone wants to use Bitcoin, they will find out a simple way just like with the Fakebook ban I mentioned earlier.


In most developed countries, Bitcoin is totally legal, the countries where Bitcoin is banned are mostly developing countries or underdeveloped ones. In developed countries government don’t interfere with the market and let things go according to the will of the market (more like the market is determined by Adam Smith’s invisible hand). This also is contributing to the national growth of their countries and also helping the GDP grow big. But in any case, Bitcoin doesn’t care about being legal or illegal, as long as there are people willing to do the mining, developers willing to continue developing apps or software, and people willing to accept it as money and trading happens, government can’t do anything about it. The best option for any government is just to accept Bitcoin and go with the flow, and enjoy the advantages which Bitcoin offers. In the near future the overall value of the cryptocurrency industry will become more than the value of a Trillion US Dollars and just imagine how many employment it will create. One of the core duties of every government is to ensure the employment of their citizens. Governments' from developed countries offer unemployment benefits to their citizens and underdeveloped countries would just let their citizens die from hunger, just accepting a technology will provide so many employment opportunities, which the people of those countries are currently missing because their governments refuses to accept Crypto as legal.


But what they can do is to ban related industry. Government can ban fiat exchanges. In many countries there are ATM machines where people can buy/sell Bitcoin using their national currencies. Countries where Bitcoin is banned, it’s not possible to setup an ATM machine in public places, or the citizens of those countries can’t do any trading on centralized exchanges using the Internet. Exchanges like Coinbase or Kraken only allows citizens of specified countries to do trading online. But what about decentralized exchanges like BitShares? Anyone can create an account on BitShares and start trading cryptos. The only problem is when a person wants to convert their Bitcoin into their local money, they are restrained a bit but that doesn’t mean much. And moreover the employment or the profit which can be made by allowing businesses to grow in the related industries are not possible. At the end of the day, governments are just simply letting go a big portion of income which they can have only by giving cryptocurrency a legal status in their jurisdiction.


In Japan, they are using Cryptocurrency to pay for goods, or to pay wage to their employees, but in Nepal, Bitcoin is banned. But that doesn’t mean people in Nepal can’t own or use Bitcoin, as long as they own a Bitcoin wallet and knows the private key they can store their coins, or send it to someone else, they can use it to buy products online from another country where online retailers are accepting payments in Bitcoin or just sell it to someone else who needs Bitcoin for their e-commerce business or whatever they need Bitcoin for. If you ask me what will I do if I have lots of Bitcoin and living in a place where its banned, I would open a travel agent business and buy air tickets using my Bitcoin and sell those tickets for fiat money, or if it doesn’t work then I will just send them to my cousin’s wallet who lives in a different country. It’s like when all the doors are closed, just enter through the windows.


At this stage you might be wondering that it is possible to trace Bitcoin and give example of Silk Road where FBI traced down the site admin and closed down the network, however they had to spend years on doing that and also FBI has the best technology to spy on others, moreover I'm not sure if it was possible because one of the FBI agent acted like a good friend with Dread Pirate Roberts for a very long time and win his trust someone and tricked him or they managed to do it using technology and traced him, but do you think Nepali government/police has that same technology like FBI? (I just noticed I’m using the example of Nepal a lot, well I’m not from Nepal, it’s just I used it as an example because it’s one of those countries where Bitcoin is banned and I once visited Nepal and the country is so good to enjoy a holiday and the nature, the sight of Mount Everest from the aircraft’s window is worth visiting Nepal, and if you are planning to visit Nepal, sorry to say you can’t pay your bills using your crypto in any shops or restaurants there, but it’s a haven for heavy drinkers, do check out their local made only if you are okay with experiencing wild stuffs). But my main point here is if you are someone from a country where Bitcoin is illegal, you can still own it and use it without telling it to anyone, maybe it could sound a bit bad to some people who are highly loyal to their state government, but I will let that judgment to the those people to decide what they want, but as more and more freelance outsourcing jobs payment are now given as Bitcoin, the governments of every country should give cryptocurrency the legal status it deserves. And not stop something so amazing, rather give it their full support.


Other than that, one can’t buy or sell Bitcoin directly to an exchange using their bank accounts or credit cards if they are from a country where Bitcoin is "banned". When I refer to Bitcoin is banned, I meant the ban on related industry. Cocaine is banned everywhere yet you can find cocaine anywhere if you are willing to pay for it, and I find this very disgusting, in today’s world we the people give our votes to them and make them the government with the hope that they will do something better for us, only to be later disappointed by them when we figure out we didn’t choose our representative, but there were a couple of people who asked us which one of them whom we prefer to get our butts kicked by and we voted for the one whom we thought would be best to kick us in the back, well that’s just my opinion on modern democracy and elections.