They were able to get themselves those bailouts, after all

It's a highly regulated industries. Only take a law or two to basically nationalize them.

But like I said, one of the two will always be able to shut you down. Corporation or government

some sort of legislation preventing financial institutions from taking ideological stances might do the trick

I agree there's always a possibility

something such that they can't refrain from doing business with you just because they don't like your politics

There always was, is, and will be

It's more about making it relatively more difficult

In the limit, you could imagine crypto being outlawed

E.g. the ISP being required to report crypto traffic, or this being sufficient cause for a search

But at this point I think you're talking about a US that's far more totalitarian that it has ever been

So there might be more...pressing issues in such a world anyway

My selfish motivation here is that I'd like to see a more decentralized/anonymized web, and if people think legislation has solved the problem it'll never come about, and many associated problems will persist as well as creating new ones

Crypto won't work. you have to be able to turn crypto into physical objects and they'll just go after the people who do that.

Plus, you'd need people to actually agree on a single form of crypto.

And BitCoin won't reach scale as currently implemented.

Do you mean that you need to be able to exchange them for physical goods?

Yes.

Because that's already doable

There's nothing preventing that

It's just not commonplace, at least not right now

I'm not saying it doesn't.

I disagree there'd need to be a single one--they'd just have to have stable exchange rates relative to each other

Over time a likely "money" would emerge

I'm saying they'll go after the people who do that as soon as it becomes "the next part of Gab"

You're correct that the current implementation can't scale

It has to be stable enough for people to know what they want.

It's one of the big concerns, and the drive in the BCH/BTC split

I'll admit your right you could have multiple options. But in practice, there will have to be a single popular one that's big enough people can think in terms of that currency. Much like US Dollars.

We're no where close to that and there's absolutely no motivation for the average person to shift to crypto.

So they won't.

I could see the same being said for e.g. PayPal

And most people still don't really use PayPal

Yet it marches on anyway

I am happy to concede it's still a long ways off

Paypal basically started as an escrow service.

You just turn things into US dollars.

they also don't have a reputation for being "money for Gab"

If normal people don't use your service, you have no defense. Period.

Paypal powers lots of online stores. I would say if you regularly purchase things online you've used it even if you don't have an account.

That's my point. You aren't going to get Crypto anywhere near that level of ubiquity and then they'll just go after the people who accept it or convert it to physical currency.