After this lesson you can: say what a government can and cannot ban.
The strongest version
The state will not tolerate a money it cannot print. When bitcoin matters enough, it will be banned, as gold was in 1933.
What a ban can and cannot do
A government can ban banks from serving bitcoin businesses and shut regulated exchanges. It cannot shut down a network of tens of thousands of nodes on every continent, stop people trading peer-to-peer, or stop a seed phrase crossing a border in someone's head.
The record
- China has "banned" bitcoin several times since 2013. Mining left and partly returned; trading moved peer-to-peer; China remains a top mining country.
- India's 2018 banking ban was struck down by its Supreme Court in 2020.
- Nigeria banned banks from serving exchanges in 2021; peer-to-peer volume rose and the local premium widened.
- Gold in 1933 was confiscated from banks and safe-deposit boxes, which is where people kept it. Self-custodied bitcoin has no such choke point.
The trend
Since 2021 the direction has been the opposite of a ban: El Salvador made it legal tender, US spot ETFs launched in 2024, states and countries have proposed strategic reserves, and the largest asset managers sell it. Bans are now jurisdictionally costly: capital, companies and miners leave for friendlier places.
The more likely risk
Not a ban on bitcoin but restrictions on self-custody: licensing wallets, reporting rules, limits on withdrawals from exchanges. That achieves surveillance goals cheaply, and it is why holding your own keys and running a node are political acts as well as technical ones.
China banned exchanges, banks and mining between 2013 and 2021. How many of those three bans stopped Chinese people from holding bitcoin?