Can Any Government Ban Bitcoin?

Bitcoin has been around the fringes of financial markets for less than a decade, but is slowly gaining prominence as an alternative asset class. Can the government of any major country step in and do the unthinkable – ban Bitcoin?

Those who think that no government (except those run by tinpot dictators) would take the extreme step of banning Bitcoin need a lesson in history. There was a time when holding goldbullion was a crime in America, punishable by a sentence of up to ten years in prison. In 1933, American President Franklin D Roosevelt issued an order requiring all Americans to hand over their gold holdings to the Federal Reserve Bank. The ban on owning gold remained in place for more than four decades, before President Ford legalized gold ownership. This move was made easy by the fact that America had abandoned the gold standard a short while prior and hence had no need to own vast quantities of gold to back up the amount of currency it printed.

Another oft-repeated argument against a ban on Bitcoin is that in the age of the globalized internet economy, individual governments lack the authority and power to act against a decentralized currency like Bitcoin. However, we only have to look at how China has bent even the Internet to realize that this is not the case. By a mix of government legislation and the blocking of popular foreign websites by the Chinese internet service providers, the Chinese government has tried to limit the Chinese to a walled garden, instead of viewing the whole world wide web. Traffic monitoring tools are used by the government to stifle political dissent. Taking a step to ban Bitcoin would not be too large a leap for the Chinese government.

Full story at http://bit.ly/2y01eSj

Source: CoinTelegraph

 

 

 

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