I think this is pretty close. Sacrifice influencers, big fish to start, but moving down the food chain. You don't need special intelligence or trucks w/ loudspeakers to find people who have transacted on exchanges -- anybody who's ever done the slightest non-trivial thing w/ btc (e.g., used it to buy something, or send to someone, or even to yourself) has an untangle-able ball of knots of capital gains obligations to report.

Maxis think the 'boating accident' defense is a defense, which is cute. If you've ever been audited you know who has to explain what to who, and what the consequences are of not providing a satisfying account. Rest assured that the government's lawyers will outlast yours.

Grabbing up a bunch of large, medium, small fish will be enough to make that nightmare vivid enough to crater 95% of self-sovereign btc activity in the USA. Since every other government shares the same interest of not having some new set of elites displace the existing ones, it shouldn't be hard to gather enough of a coalition to make the net global.

At least, that's my hypothesis. We'll have an empirical test of it coming up.

Government in 2030 driving around with loudspeakers:

“Give us your bitcoins.. we have an AI software that can read your mind and extract your 12 words!”

Normies: “Eeh.. ok.. here are my private keys. Can I go back to watch my Netflix now?”

Hmm....

I think war. War offers a pretext for anything and everything. Under cover of war, you could demonize bitcoin holders, change the terminology (not self-custodial but "unhosted", things like that), push stories about terrorists and "our enemies" using bitcoin.

Actually I can see things happening in this order -

Of course bitcoin is so different from gold, thank goodness. Hopefully the future is a lot brighter.