The cultism is strong in this one... Death to Bitcoin, long live Bitcoin Cash!!! We will stop at any GOOD argument...
If anything is the death of Bitcoin, it will be Monero. It's the coin i'm most bullish about right now. https://www.monero.how/why-monero-vs-bitcoin https://getmonero.org/ https://xmr.to/ Bitcoin Cash is in my top 5 coins.
The scariest thing for me as cryptocurrency holder is a US govt action. I have experience with the Pokerstars/online poker crap.
I am actually surprised they haven't been acting on it. (so far only 1 Senator tried to introduce something) I was expecting something drastic at least 2 years ago. Maybe the Obama administration was soft. Another reason could be that we haven't had a really high profile kidnapping/black mailing or terrorist using it. Once that happens...
I can answer to this. With Pokerstars, they did not go after the users. Yea, we can play all we want. Cashing out? Can't. No bank would deal with it. At first, Pokerstars was sending me physical checks in the mail. Until one of their executives got arrested in New York on a layover. They will stop the big US-based companies from supporting the network. It's going to be ugly with no Bitpay (payment processor), Bittrex, Poloniex and the biggest one is Coinbase/GDAX.
I find the government is really bad at being proactive. Usually they only do clean-up, and very poorly. Look at the subprime mess in 2007. One can even argue the way they solved the problem didn't really solve anything cause 10 years later, most people are not better off, and the bulk of the money made the rich even richer at the expense of everyone else. So I don't expect the government to step in early to fix a problem before its a bigger problem, but I do expect them to one day do something in drastic fashion.
The lack of imagination never stops to amaze me. Let's assume you are US based. What are you going to spend your bitcoins on? Order everything from China? Because after the US the EU will soon follow and China isn't crazy about unregulated capital flow either... So for a "currency of the future" thingy being banned in the 3 most important markets is kind of big deal... But enjoy your alpaca socks... By the way how are you going to cash out from a non-US based broker if your bank doesn't accept money transfer from them? Gonna take a trip to Mexico to the BTC ATM?
With virtual gold it took them 11 years, so bitcoin has 2-3 years left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-gold#Criminal_prosecution Here is the best part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Bullion "After the arrest of Fayed, the US Attorney unsealed an indictment of e-Bullion and Goldfinger Coin & Bullion for failure to have a money transmitter license under the USA PATRIOT Act. Although the charges against the corporations were eventually dropped, the US Attorney's Office seized all of the assets of the Goldfinger companies, including the bullion backing e-Bullion.com from the Perth Mint and the Fayed's ranch in California. e-Bullion account holders have not been compensated by the U.S. Government for the confiscation of the bullion backing their accounts." That is 24 million bucks taken away by the government...