What If Bitcoin Were Banned Worldwide?

Not long ago, I asked on X: “Imagine every government in the world decided to ban all cryptocurrencies … except two. Which two should be allowed to stay?”

People replied: Bitcoin and Ethereum, Bitcoin and Solana, Bitcoin and Hyperliquid. In every answer, Bitcoin came first.

But does Bitcoin really need protection from a government ban? Let’s take a closer look at why even a global crackdown wouldn’t be enough to kill it - and which cryptocurrencies actually depend on state tolerance to survive.

A Global Bitcoin Ban - What Would That Actually Mean?

First, let’s clarify what a “ban” would really mean. Most likely, governments wouldn’t be able to prohibit simply owning Bitcoin - because ownership itself is a fuzzy concept in the Bitcoin world:

1. Control over coins is defined solely by access to a private key - and that’s not something you can see, prove, or confiscate easily.
2. Moreover, anyone could send coins to anyone else - even to the very official who introduced the ban - and that person would technically “control” them now, whether they wanted to or not.

What authorities could realistically do is criminalize any use of Bitcoin. That would mean individuals could be punished for transacting in BTC, companies would stop accepting it, miners would be forced to shut down their operations, and node operators pushed offline. Internet providers might be ordered to monitor and block any Bitcoin-related traffic.

It’s a grim scenario: legally using Bitcoin would become impossible. But would that be enough to kill the network?

Would the Bitcoin Network Survive a Ban?

Decentralization is Bitcoin’s greatest strength. The network is so global and widely distributed that shutting it down all at once is nearly impossible. Miners, nodes, and developers are scattered across the world, often anonymous or pseudonymous, each with their own incentives - but united by a common goal: to keep the network alive.

Bitcoin has no headquarters, no CEO, no stack of servers in a single data center. There’s nowhere to go to “flip the switch” and turn it off.

This is what sets Bitcoin apart from most other crypto projects - it has no single point of failure. There’s no Vitalik Buterin making executive decisions about which transactions should be reversed and which should be allowed through. And there’s no foundation whose shutdown could paralyze the system. The network rules are upheld by a decentralized community. Even if someone were to buy up a massive amount of BTC, they couldn’t rewrite the protocol or stop others from making transactions.

So even if every government coordinated a global crackdown, Bitcoin wouldn’t die. It would go underground - but the network would keep running.

Mining Beyond Jurisdictions

What would happen to Bitcoin mining if it were outlawed everywhere? Large-scale mining farms would shut down - that’s almost certain. But this wouldn’t be the first time miners have come under pressure. And the network has survived before.

Take the 2021 mining ban in China. Almost half of Bitcoin’s global hash rate went offline overnight. But just a few months later, the network recovered - miners simply moved elsewhere. Chinese mining companies shipped their equipment to Kazakhstan, Russia, North America, and other regions. Bitcoin didn’t just survive that crackdown - it came out stronger. What used to be a heavily centralized mining operation became more geographically dispersed.

Now imagine there’s no country left without a mining ban. Would all hash power really disappear? Unlikely. Miners are a resourceful bunch. They’d go underground, hide their operations, and keep mining illegally if they had to.

After all, mining is just solving math problems with a computer. To ban mining outright, you’d have to ban math itself. What governments could really restrict is the final part of the process - assembling a block and broadcasting it to the network. But that’s the easiest part to conceal. Let’s say the police find a working mining rig. How can they prove it actually mined a block and violated the law?

And what if the mining farm is on a ship in international waters, where no national law applies? Or in a country with weak enforcement, where corruption lets miners operate in exchange for bribes? There are still remote places on Earth - from the Siberian wilderness to the Amazon jungle - where you could set up a generator and run a farm. It sounds extreme, but Bitcoin offers unmatched financial freedom, and those who want to mine it won’t just give up. They’ll dig bunkers, disguise their farms as other kinds of businesses - anything to stay hidden.

As for energy? Some will use mobile generators. Others will tap into hidden renewable sources - like geothermal vents in the desert. Even now, miners are setting up shop in isolated areas with cheap electricity - building turbines on mountain streams. If mining goes illegal, they’ll just scale down and spread out to avoid attention. A single big farm might break into dozens of small ones across different locations. That way, their power usage and noise levels won’t stand out.

Governments might try to block Bitcoin-related internet traffic. But there are workarounds. Even if cut off from the regular web, miners can still discover and share new blocks. For example, Blockstream has been broadcasting the Bitcoin blockchain via satellite for years. All it takes is a cheap satellite dish, and you can receive the latest blocks from space - passively, without revealing your location. From the outside, no one can tell if you’re watching HBO or syncing a Bitcoin node.

Miners deep in the wilderness or floating in the ocean can still stay in sync with the network. And they can broadcast their newly found blocks - using radio, Tor nodes, or even relaying the block over the phone. As wild as that sounds, people have already experimented with it - transmitting block data via ham radio and mesh networks like goTenna.

In short, censors won’t be able to fully isolate miners from one another. There will always be ways to transmit data. The network will keep updating - even if it means sacrificing some speed and convenience.

Could Someone Take Over Bitcoin If the Hash Rate Collapsed?

There’s a critical detail people rarely talk about. If Bitcoin’s hash rate were to drop by a factor of 100 - meaning 99% of miners shut down - new blocks would appear 100 times slower. Instead of every 10 minutes, it would be roughly once every 1,000 minutes - that’s about 16 hours and 40 minutes per block.

The protocol adjusts mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks. But at that reduced speed, reaching the next adjustment could take up to 3 years and 10 months. Only then would the difficulty drop, allowing blocks to be mined at the usual pace again.

During that time, transactions would crawl. Confirmations would be painfully slow. It’s a serious vulnerability - but not a fatal one.

Even in this scenario, new underground miners could eventually join the network and help speed up the difficulty adjustment. And in the meantime, Bitcoin payments could still flow through the Lightning Network - as long as channels are open ahead of time. Got one set up? I do.

If only a tiny fraction of miners remain after a ban, there’s a risk that a government, using confiscated mining hardware, could seize control of the block production - a 51% attack. But there’s always a chance new independent miners could come online at any moment and rebalance the system. That makes any attempted takeover temporary by nature.

Holding the network “hostage” becomes pointless. As soon as outside miners appear, the attacker’s costs skyrocket, and it’s no longer economically viable to keep control. What’s more, any node on the network - or the entire community - could simply refuse to accept blocks generated by malicious government miners if an attack is suspected.

So even with a drastically reduced hash rate, long-term control is difficult to maintain. The network retains its ability to resist.

Transactions and Nodes: The Digital Underground

Outside of mining, things get even simpler. Anyone can run a Bitcoin node on a regular computer - no special permissions required. And filtering out Bitcoin traffic isn’t easy either, thanks to tools like VPNs, Tor, proxies, and encryption.

If things get truly oppressive, people can still transmit transactions without using the internet at all. Just like block data, transaction details can be relayed through any communication channel - if there’s enough determination. You could literally blink them out in Morse code with a flashlight. You just need to encrypt the message first, so no one knows what you’re transmitting.

There have even been cases where the data required to send a transaction - such as a private key - was embedded in an image and shared online.

An image containing a hidden private key for a Bitcoin address

So for governments to fully ban Bitcoin transactions, they’d need to outlaw all forms of communication. That would mean shutting down the internet, phones, and mail - and forbidding people from speaking to each other. It’s hard to imagine any government taking it that far just to stop a cryptocurrency.

The Vulnerability of Other Cryptocurrencies

So far, we’ve seen that Bitcoin could likely survive a global ban. But what about other cryptocurrencies?

That’s where things change. Many altcoins are far less decentralized - and far more dependent on specific people or organizations.

Take Ethereum, for example. It’s a vast ecosystem and the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. It may seem decentralized, with thousands of nodes around the world. But since 2022, Ethereum has been running on a Proof-of-Stake system, where security relies on validators - holders of ETH who confirm new blocks.

And here’s the catch: many of the largest validators are well-known companies and staking pools with real-world offices, teams, and servers. If governments go after these key players, a significant portion of the network’s stake could go offline.

Worse still, that stake might not just disappear - it could be frozen. This would leave the network without access to a big chunk of its capital. And because users often delegate their ETH to major validators for convenience and trust, those users could be left with no way to move their assets elsewhere if the stake is blocked.

The same risk applies to other Proof-of-Stake coins. Their reliance on large, identifiable entities makes them far more vulnerable to coordinated government pressure.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, works differently. If mining pools come under threat, miners can simply switch to different pools - or mine solo. Because mining hardware is physically decentralized, there’s no way to shut everyone down at once.

The Most Vulnerable Cryptocurrencies

Some cryptocurrencies are especially fragile under government pressure - particularly stablecoins backed by fiat reserves, like USDT or USDC. These tokens are directly tied to the traditional financial system. Behind each one is a company with a bank account holding the cash reserves that back the coin’s value.

If authorities decide to ban stablecoins, they can instantly freeze those reserves. The issuing companies are unlikely to resist - they already cooperate with regulators - and could disable token transfers directly via smart contracts. Unlike Bitcoin, these stablecoins can’t survive a war with the state. Their entire value depends on trust in a legally recognized reserve currency. Without legal standing, these “digital dollars” would simply collapse.

Then there are cryptocurrencies linked to real-world identity. Projects like World (formerly Worldcoin), which scans your iris in exchange for a verified token, or Idena, where each address is tied to a unique human, may have good intentions - such as fighting bots - but under a ban, this becomes a weakness. These networks can’t expose your personal data directly, but the mere fact that a blockchain address is linked to a unique person becomes a liability in a crackdown.

Governments would find it far easier to identify users of these systems than those of Bitcoin, where addresses are not inherently tied to any real-world identity. Identity-based cryptocurrencies were designed for cooperation with the state - not for hiding from it. Under a global ban, no one would want to use them.

Examples of Truly Censorship-Resistant Cryptocurrencies

Aside from Bitcoin, several other cryptocurrencies are built to withstand censorship and government pressure:

• Monero (XMR) - An anonymous Proof-of-Work network where all transactions are private by default: addresses, amounts, and even transaction history are hidden. Monero also supports routing through Tor and I2P, and its resistance to ASICs prevents mining from becoming centralized.
• Litecoin (LTC) - A decentralized Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency that operates similarly to Bitcoin. While it has a smaller market cap, its mining is more accessible to small-scale participants.
• Verge (XVG) - A privacy-focused Proof-of-Work network that integrates Tor and stealth addresses to obscure users’ IPs and transaction data.
• Grin and Beam - Cryptocurrencies based on the Mimblewimble protocol, designed for full transactional anonymity. These networks eliminate permanent addresses and transaction histories, making censorship significantly harder.

None of these networks have a central authority, public foundation, or a “head” that can be cut off. Their nodes and miners are highly distributed and anonymous - making them especially resilient, even in the face of strict bans.

Conclusion: Which Cryptocurrencies Deserve to Be Spared?

At the beginning, I mentioned a tweet I made: “If every cryptocurrency were banned except for two, which ones would you save?”

Everyone who answered included Bitcoin. But as we’ve seen, Bitcoin doesn’t really need to be “saved” - it has grown strong enough to survive even a coordinated global ban.

Many other coins, on the other hand, would not. Which is why it would make more sense to spare the cryptocurrencies that can’t survive without some level of government tolerance.

If I had to pick two, I’d choose the ones that are most actively used by rabbit.io clients - the ones people are actually exchanging, which shows real demand.

Out of the 10,000+ listed cryptocurrencies, the most commonly exchanged on rabbit.io are BTC, XMR, ETH, and USDT. Bitcoin and Monero could survive without my pardon. So, if I had to answer my own question, I’d pick Ether and USDT.

Of course, that’s a personal choice. Someone else might want to save ADA, with its academically rigorous design, or a digital identity project like Idena - figuring that without legal status, they’d vanish, and the world would lose some interesting ideas.

But the principle remains the same: Bitcoin doesn’t need a get-out-of-jail card - it already survives where others don’t. It’s the more delicate shoots of the crypto ecosystem that might be worth sparing.