Government will fail in attempts to shut down rise of cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin is, to many millions of people, more reliable than traditional money. This is partially due to the fact that Bitcoin is decentralized and nearly anonymous. People can use Bitcoin to purchase anything they want without government interference, including illegal guns and drugs.

The U.S. government has battled with sellers on several occasions, most notable being the Silk Road site. The Silk Road site was launched in 2011 on Tor, which is an anonymous browser, for the purpose of selling illegal drugs. The drugs were bought primarily with Bitcoins. In 2013, the U.S. government shut down the Silk Road and arrested the founder, who had gone by the pseudonym of Dread Pirate Roberts. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Later in 2013, Silk Road 2.0 was launched and promptly taken down by the FBI. The operator was arrested in late 2014.

When the government shut down the Silk Road, it also seized every Bitcoin within it. They took 26 thousand Bitcoins from the Silk Road and 144 thousand Bitcoins belonging to Dread Pirate Roberts, which amounted to over a hundred million dollars at the time.

Since the Silk Road, the U.S. government has done similar operations several times and repeatedly attempted to regulate use of Bitcoin, with one economist even stating that the cryptocurrency should be banned.

However, fans of cryptocurrency aren’t worried. They know the government wants to ban Bitcoin, but they also know the reality of the situation, which is that it can’t. Bitcoin is, as mentioned at the beginning of this article, decentralized and anonymous. There is no single place containing everyone’s Bitcoins as there is with banks such as JP Morgan, making Bitcoin impossible to hack. Additionally, everyone on Bitcoin is anonymous. The government couldn’t track users if it tried.

While the government desperately wants to slap regulations on Bitcoin, it can’t. Bitcoin users can buy as many illegal drugs as they want, and the U.S. government cannot stop them.

As Bitcoin becomes more and more popular, so do other cryptocurrencies.

Among these are Litecoin, Ripple XRP, Bitcoin Dark, Bitcash, Iota and literally hundreds of others.

Most of these function similarly to Bitcoin, with a few quirks that make them stand out from the herd. The appeal here is that, for newer investors, these cryptos are much more affordable. Bitcoin has risen to $18,936, and although each Bitcoin can be split into 100 million pieces, it’s still quite intimidating.

Altcoins like Litecoin ($334), Ripple XRP ($0.76) and Iota ($5.35) are more appealing to middle class Americans. Each of these cryptos has its own website detailing how much they are worth on a given day (cryptocurrencies tend to fluctuate) and where you can buy.

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