GOVERNMENTS COULD BAN BITCOIN

Some governments have tried, like China, India and Nigeria for example. In each case, the use of bitcoin rises rapidly by the people of said country.

There is no way for governments to truly 'ban' bitcoin, as it is by its nature permissionless and censorship-resistant. It is code and code is speech.

That said, governments can make it harder to buy and sell with, and into fiat. They can also tax it as a commodity, like they do in the US.

Ultimately, it will not be in their favor to try and ban it, since bitcoin is inevitable and they are starting to see that. They would be far smarter to add it to their country's balance sheet as a hedge against their inflating fiat currencies.

Governments are good at cutting off the heads of centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.

~ Satoshi Nakamoto

Read: Can Governments Stop Bitcoin? - Alex Gladstein, CSO of the Human Rights Foundation Can the Government Ban Bitcoin? Four Things You Need to Know - Nick Giambruno