I don't think they'll be able to stop it.
Yes, the on-ramps and off-ramps to fiat are still controlled by KYC'd exchanges.
But there is a growing bitcoin circular economy that doesn't need fiat on-ramps and off-ramps.
One day you may be able to fulfill all your basic needs without ever needing to make an exchange in fiat.
When that day comes, it won't really matter how many KYC exchanges there are, or how much bitcoin is being held in banker controlled ETFs.
I hope you are right but how do you get that critical market scale adoption to happen as things stand? To enable widespread use as MoE you need both merchants and consumers to move to Bitcoin payment but the current arbitrary tax designation of Bitcoin as a commodity makes the tax recording and reporting obligations so complex that very very few of either consumers or businesses are going to even start the process. Even in El Salvador where it appears that the tax reporting complexity of using Bitcoin as a MoE has been removed, adoption by consumers and businesses is hardly widespread- by all reports it is very limited.
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people save in harder assets. They 'spend' the softer ones. If they run out of money generally, they will sell or spend what they have to (otherwise why would someone sell a hard asset for example like a house unless it's productive/necessary for them to do so?)
In other words, bitcoin is likely the hardest asset generally speaking available anywhere... so why would someone spend it generally speaking if they have alternatives?
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