For the last few days, I have been terrified by the following idea.
Imagine a situation where most people have switched to bitcoin. You can pay with bitcoin everywhere via LN.
What if the regulator bans businesses from opening channels to other non-whitelisted nodes? 🤔
Even though you have your own node and a good connection, you can't pay at any of the official stores. The regulator would simply know right away that the business in question violated the enforced rules by opening a channel with an unverified party.
Entry into such an ecosystem would only be possible through a licensed entity, which can have any number of requirements and restrictions.
Consequently, there is no problem tightening such a system. After years, they can switch to fractional reserves and eventually separate from bitcoin again completely
Do you have any ideas on how to counter this? Or does it seem like nonsense to you? Thanks for every comment.
Btw if you want to add some on-chain paranoia, I recommend this article: How could regulators successfully introduce Bitcoin censorship and other dystopias