In the immortal words of Boris: "We are invincible!"
To be quite honest I was thinking the opposite. Their next move is to try and get rid of bitcoins all together.... I really hope thats not possible... but I'm sure they will try.
They will never be able to ban bitcoins, per-se. unless they outlaw mathematics somehow. What they will do, however, is hit the services or exchanges, where one converts bitcoins to/from state-issued fiat currency. We have not yet reached the stage where one can survive using bitcoins alone. If such a day were to come, the state's power would be greatly weakened, if not effectively collapse.
Consider for a moment, just what is currency? Currency is anything that is widely accepted as a means of exchange. In New France, in the days of the Ancien Regime, there was a shortage of currency. The Governor of New France solved this by signing playing cards, which were used as currency. How is it that you can go into a shop with a small piece of plastic with a magnetic stripe on it, and walk out with hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars of merchandise? It is because credit and debit cards are widely accepted as a means of exchange.
So it is with bitcoins.
In my view, the only way that the government can outlaw alternative currencies like bitcoin would be for them to shut down the electronic channels over which such instruments are traded -- in other words, they would have to shutdown the Internet. Historicaly, this is not without precedent -- in the early 1980s, under the Jaruzelski governmentin Poland, martial law was imposed, and the entire (civilian) telephone system was shutdown. Solidarity used the telephones to organize -- in one fell swoop, their primary means of communicatons was destroyed.
Nightcrawler
4096R/BBF7433B 2012-09-22 Nightcrawler <Nightcrawler@SR>
PGP Key Fingerprint = D870 C6AC CC6E 46B0 E0C7 3955 B8F1 D88E BBF7 433B
Security is a bit like religion... some things have to be taken on faith.
Where security differs from religion is that security is NOT retroactive.
Unlike Christianity, where you can come to Jesus, be 'saved' and have all
your sins washed away, with security you can adopt Tails or PGP, and be
secure from that point forward, but rest assured that your previous sins
(security failings) WILL come back to haunt you and bite you in the ass.
The original DPR is the poster child for that, right now.
