I guess it depends on how/what they ban it. But, if I’m honest, I would say that I wouldn’t use it unless I absolutely needed to. I’m not putting myself and my family at risk for some allegiance to software. At the same time, I do think if governments all banned it, it would quickly be the only way to buy deplorable things like books, the Bible, healthy foods, etc. So I would still be glad it exists and you mad lads keep it running.

I will gladly take all the bitcoin in the world and be the last man on Earth holding BTC. Just me and Satoshi...

Announcement: if you are scared shit and your pants are full of shit, no worry I will take all your bitcoins now and will take care of them.

Let me deal with govs for you.

Ah, the "related" section of Stacker News never fails. I knew this topic felt familiar: #61189

TLDR my two options I would consider:

Like every government in the world has aligned incentives. You start with a fallacy.

If you ban bitcoin because as a technology it weakens you, your adversary will use it.

Banning something makes it even more scarce. Look what happened with banning ppl form getting dollars in Argentina. Normies are still buying dollars and at a premium.

For sure you can ban a technology, you can't uninvent it.

I have moral qualms by not defunding the Fiat war machine and helping the commies destroying the middle class by not bying btc whenever I can (like today at an anon ATM).

I can’t remember any case where a certain technology was banned and it was then gone forever. On the other hand, there were many cases (mainly in totalitarian countries), where similar attempts were made, for example the telegram ban in Iran & Russia or VPN bans in China. The result of those bans was not quite as expected (to phrase it mildly :) ).

The wheel can’t be uninvented. This is a property of the human brain and can be observed throughout the history.

But I mean we still can speculate, right? :) In case of a hypothetical bitcoin ban, I think there would emerge multiple forks of bitcoin plus a large underground community still running the original code. The government would be forced to physically go from house to house and search every single room to prevent people from running the nodes.

That said, to ban a technology like bitcoin, one would need to revert a whole bunch of underlying technological advances, starting with asymmetric cryptography and ending up with SSH, decades of Linux development and Tor.

I'd immediately send my cold storage through a coin mixer to a new wallet stamped on a titanium plate, then bury it on my inlaws acreage.

If you read the ‘Restrict Act’ first-hand, it’s becoming pretty clear that the road is being paved for something of the sort.

Even using a VPN is going to be a jail’able offence. Let alone transacting outside of their system.

Bitcoin is the moral imperative! Why should we have moral qualms with using it?

In consequence, even in your apocalyptic scenario, there will be regions and communities where Bitcoin would be used in a circular economy type of way. So yes, Bitcoin or nothing 😄

Same thing I did when they banned drugs.

Let's not discuss this outcome because it is completely infeasible unless you have one world government. If you want to discuss what would happen if the US banned it, then I think we have a reasonable thought experiment of something that could potentially happen (I don't think it is a likelihood, but it's not a non zero chance). In a US ban scenario, most holders would comply immediately, a small portion of holders would leave the US and everyone in between would be left to fight through the courts, legislatures and in the streets to have at least a few states be Bitcoin states. I do think it is important to work to plant the seeds for this now amongst pro bitcoin states and get them to entrench the right to bitcoin ownership and transactability into law.

there's a pretty good recent conversation that was had by the lads over on the Bitcoin discord on this very topic, debating whether a govt ban would be good for Bitcoin or not.