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You misunderstand me. I meant it was an uphill battle to argue to all the paranoid people that the U.S. government has yet to outlaw trading in Yen, Euro, etc, even though it doesn't control those currencies either.What exactly gave you the right to call me "paranoid"?
The fact that I said the US might ban the Bitcoin?
For one, the Bitcoin is NOT like the Euro or the Yen at all. It doesn't have any government to back it, and it has properties that make it not very likable to any large government.
Banning bitcoin wont be like banning Euro or the Yen, which are legitimate, sovereign national currencies.
It would be like banning or freezing assets in off-shore accounts (which governments have been known to do). Or like banning the private buying of gold (which the US had done, from 1933 to mid-seventies:
"Executive Order 6102 is an Executive Order signed on April 5, 1933, by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the Hoarding of Gold Coin, Gold Bullion, and Gold Certificates within the continental United States". The order criminalized the possession of monetary gold by any individual, partnership, association or corporation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
Private / alternative currencies have been banned in several cases all over the world. One example from Wikipedia:
In Australia, the Bank Notes Tax Act of 1910 practically shut down the circulation of private currencies by imposing a prohibitive tax on the practice. It was later repealed and a fine imposed for private currencies (Commonwealth Bank Act 1945). Many other nations have similar such policies to eliminate private sector competition.
Or:
The co-operative society Jord Arbejde Kapital was founded in Denmark during the Great Depression in 1931. The society issued a popular local currency which was subsequently outlawed by the Danish government in 1933.
Not to mention that the whole idea that the US doesn't care at all about Yen and Euros is flawed BS. The US would very much like to keep the dollar unthreatened as the "golden world standard". But those currencies belong to very large economies and countries for the US to be able to do anything about it. Not to mention that the Yen is tied to the dollar in intricate ways nowadays (Chinese own trillions of it).
Still, when any third world or developing country expresses a desire to do business in Euros (something that happened oftentimes before the Euro crisis), the US exerts as much political and diplomatic pressure as it can to have them revert course.
So, using the fact that the US does not ban the Yen and the Euro as an "argument" why it cannot ban bitcoin? Really, not the very best in informed thinking. To call one "paranoid" about arguing the possibility of the bitcoin ban? Even worse (and rude to top).
You might as well say that since the US hasn't entered a war with China or EU, it will never enter a war with a terrorist group operating outside any government. Seeing that China and EU are huge countries/unions, whereas the Bitcoin community is just an ad-hoc random assembly of people investing on an alternative monetary system.
