When the US government declares you a problem and is serious about it you're many things, but winning is probably not one of them.
It's pretty trivial to make Bitcoin virtually useless. Pass some laws that effectively render it useless to corporate entities and it's basically banished to the shadow realm. Won't stop criminals from using it, but you can regulate crypto to hell for 99% of the population.
The world is more than US alone. Convert your BTC into Euros, and then you can take those euro's to dollars.
The law fighting internet stuff seems very difficult. Just look at the rich media companies. Name me a movie or song and I'll download it. Even with all their money and laws they couldn't stop this. So how would you expect them to stop internet money.
Even if it's technically feasible to implement I imagine the population would not respond well to the government seizing millions of fortunes overnight. I would guess public opinion toward btc is fairly neutral or positive at the moment. Although it seems like certain entities are attempting to change that with all the recent environmental bitcoin FUD articles.
The government cannot make bitcoin worthless through legislation. The government can make bitcoin worthless through an attack that costs less than 1% of the DoD budget though.
> Cocaine is a highly inelastic good. Bitcoin is highly elastic. It's trivial to ban goods with elastic demand.
What do people use Bitcoin for? Buying drugs online! If the demand for drugs is inelastic, then presumably the demand for a way to buy them online is somewhat inelastic too?
I would think that BTC is not used only for buying drugs. If my numbers are correct daily BTC transaction volume is 290K or 15B€ or 750 tones of cocaine at 20€/g. Thats a lot of cocaine. In 2018 its estimayed that worldwide 1.7k tones were produced totally.
It's pretty trivial to make Bitcoin virtually useless. Pass some laws that effectively render it useless to corporate entities and it's basically banished to the shadow realm. Won't stop criminals from using it, but you can regulate crypto to hell for 99% of the population.