If the government acts at the ISP level, can't it block access to the bitcoin blockchain? Or is that impossible because there are multiple peers?
The latest release of Bitcoin Core supports BIP324 which enables encrypted peer-to-peer communication. Previously nodes communicated in the clear and it was trivial for ISPs to recognize Bitcoin traffic, but with BIP324, they at least need to actively run Bitcoin nodes to recognize and man-in-the-middle Bitcoin traffic. Beyond that Bitcoin Core has support for multiple privacy networks which ISPs could not gratuitously monitor already.
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