Why Isn't Bitcoin Banned Everywhere?
I think the author comes pretty close to what I think is the right answer: on the scale of nations, BTC doesn&#x27;t matter.  It&#x27;s an experiment.  It&#x27;s not more anonymous than paper currency, and not much more effective at laundering money.  Governments aren&#x27;t worried about it because it isn&#x27;t really changing anything.  If I want to buy a nuke, tank, or a fighter jet, BTC isn&#x27;t solving the the hard problems related to that (taking delivery of said nuke, tank, or jet without being intercepted).  BTC is enabling stoners to buy drugs online, and frankly, governments aren&#x27;t that worried because stoners were already buying drugs.<p>I also don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s so much as &quot;governments don&#x27;t care about people storing wealth&quot; so much as &quot;it&#x27;s not storing wealth.&quot;  It&#x27;s not worth as much as you think it is, and it&#x27;s not that good at storing wealth (I will accept that it may be a decent high-risk opportunity for growth).  The current $1 trillion market cap is calculated by assuming all of the 18.65 million BTC ever mined could be sold at the current asking price.  But they can&#x27;t be, because the order books aren&#x27;t that deep and never will be, plus there are a lot of mined BTC that are in wallets with lost keys.  It&#x27;s probably still worth more than some small countries, but BTC definitely isn&#x27;t worth $1 trillion.  And when you consider BTC as a store of wealth, gold is a way better choice.  I don&#x27;t want my store of wealth to be experiencing gargantuan shifts in value over a few weeks.<p>It might sound like I&#x27;m shitting on BTC.  I&#x27;m not, I think it&#x27;s a cool experiment.  I like the idea of being able to transfer money to friends without fees, and I&#x27;m glad that crypto helps keep banks honest.  It was certainly novel.  If I were to shit on anyone, it would be cryptocurrency bros that are full of themselves and think that their one thing is going to turn the world upside down.  I&#x27;m for BTC as long as people don&#x27;t get too hung up about it and instead we see BTC as helping us figure out ways to do financial things better.