Can Governments Stop Bitcoin?

The mainstream media typically portrays Bitcoin as a penny stock gone wild, or a new kind of digital tulip mania. But the reality is Bitcoin is a political project that threatens to fundamentally disrupt the Davos-led economic system, with everyone from Janet Yellen to Christine Lagarde expressing fear about its rise and demanding it be regulated.

Governments retain their power in part by issuing and controlling money. Bitcoin is a new model that mints and secures money without governments. So the big question is: Why haven t governments or megacorps stopped it? And if they try to attack Bitcoin in the near future, what would that look like?

There is an enormous amount of speculation on the Internet about how Bitcoin might be attacked, but few stop to think about why it hasn t already been destroyed. The answer is that there are political and economic incentives for more and more people to push the system forward and strengthen its security, and strong political, economic, and technical disincentives that discourage attacks.

via quillette.com

Number go up; freedom go up.