If the USA were to ban all things Bitcoin, the price would fall hard, but the machine would keep rolling. If, say, 5 of the top 10 GDP nations followed suit, then not only would the price crash, but the threat of some government sponsoring malicious mining would be strong enough to kill it off (even if it never actually happened).
Bitcoin is not invulnerable. It was bootstrapped from nothing and is still fledgling. Thankfully, it becomes harder to kill as it becomes more of a threat. Right now there is a trillion USD worth of distributed motivation to keep it running. Politically killing Bitcoin would be easier than politically killing Google. But, not that much... First major nation to do so could score some short-term political points. But, all nations are balancing concern about missing out vs. the threat to their own power.
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If the USA were to ban all things Bitcoin, the price would fall hard, but the machine would keep rolling. If, say, 5 of the top 10 GDP nations followed suit, then not only would the price crash, but the threat of some government sponsoring malicious mining would be strong enough to kill it off (even if it never actually happened).
Bitcoin is not invulnerable. It was bootstrapped from nothing and is still fledgling. Thankfully, it becomes harder to kill as it becomes more of a threat. Right now there is a trillion USD worth of distributed motivation to keep it running. Politically killing Bitcoin would be easier than politically killing Google. But, not that much... First major nation to do so could score some short-term political points. But, all nations are balancing concern about missing out vs. the threat to their own power.