Is it really possible to ban bitcoin?
Let me do the honors and take you back in time to a date, one day in particular that came up with a potential to change the financial, political, and social paradigm of the modern society, one that had the vision of reshaping the normal routine we inherited from our ancestors- January 3rd, 2009.
This was the time when the world was shook by the 2008 financial crisis, which is taken as the most devastating impact the world had seen since the Great Depression of 1929 (almost a century ago). And the significance of conceiving an idea that is inflation-proof, was most in need during this time.
Prior to the roll-out of bitcoin, a paper was published by a person/group that went by the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto”. Crazy of it all, the founder that went by this pseudonym and owner of this ingenious invention is not known to date. He/they vanished into thin air right after the roll-out.
Many notable personalities, like Elon Musk, had been claimed to be the master-mind behind it, but none of the claims came out as true. Even a person whose actual name was “Satoshi Nakamoto” went out saying he had no connection with bitcoin.
A great deal of government bodies across the globe has tried to limit or ban bitcoin. But the outcome was a not-so fruitful effort. The reason underlies in the original design of the coin. The paper the founder/s published explains this in a whole lot of detail.
The paper starts out by stating that the recent digitization of the financial world had yet to overcome the issue of becoming completely digital. The hurdle of making it fully digital was that of double-spending.
Double spending means that if we hypothetically imagine of turning the dollar to a digital currency and thus we created a file to represent it, it then means we made the dollar digital. But not so fast, because I could be sending this file more than once, thus double-spending it, causing the whole thing to lose value.
There should be a way such that the digital file stored can only be sent once and any other attempt to send it again and again should not be allowed. And the approach the founder/s took to solve this issue was to form a block-chain, the blocks being not one centralized bank or body but a group of computers; we are not talking about a dozen or few hundreds of computers, but millions. The original paper published will be quoted in this article if you would like to read more on how they used them to overcome the hurdle.
This nature of the innovation is what makes it immune to any form of ban acted upon by external body. In order to ban it, you will have to ban the millions of computer(nodes) already in the chain, or another approach would be to shutdown the internet completely, which is practically impossible.
Recently the headline in news outlets had been Bitcoin: Banned In Ethiopia detailing that the National Bank Of Ethiopia is going to ban crypto and bitcoin. Borkena News stated, “The assessment from the National Bank of Ethiopia is that the use of digital currency is being used extensively in the country, and it said it is something that does not have recognition from the Bank. And it called on the public to tip law enforcement bodies in the event of observation of the use of digital currencies.”
The statement made public by the national bank also stated that it is illegal to use any other form of currency other than the birr in the country. A detailed analysis about the event with a brief history of money itself was recently uploaded in ETHIO TECH with JayP YouTube channel which will be linked in this article as well.
As a closing statement, I would like to include a hypothetical point of view. What if instead of banning the coin, our government adopts it as the official currency of Ethiopia? We all know the rate at which our currency “Birr” is devaluing. For instance, its’ drop in value in the past 5 years by far exceeds its’ drop for the whole decade prior.
So what would it be like to change this currency not by a coin that is not only is inflation-proof but also increases in value? Perhaps a solution to our never-ending financial crisis, and of being called a third-world country for our dependence on the US and the first-world countries for foreign currency? Let me close my article by extending this question to you all.
Links
Bitcoin paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto detailing how it was designed:
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
Video on JayP YouTube Channel:
Borkena News About the recent ban:
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