You don't need computers or money. You have parliaments, police and armies. Just make it illegal.
You're banning Bitcoin mining — the part a government can actually find: warehouses, power bills, machines. That's why every real ban has aimed there.
China's 2021 mining ban — the biggest ever attempted
You made it illegal everywhere. You didn't make it stop. A law is an instruction to people — and this network takes instructions from no one. No company to fine, no office to raid, no one to arrest who can turn it off. No server, remember?
Can't beat it from outside? Join it and cheat. →So bans do nothing?
Bans do hurt people. In a banned country, using Bitcoin carries real legal risk, exchanges close, and adoption slows. China's ban really did push out miners and exchanges — even though the network itself shrugged.
But you can't ban owning it. Owning Bitcoin is knowing a secret number — twelve words you can memorise. It isn't an object to confiscate or an account to freeze. A border search can't find a number in someone's head. States have tried the nearest thing — the US banned private gold in 1933 and mostly collected it from the honest — but gold has weight and needs vaults; a key doesn't.
The genuinely serious version of this attack is the whole world coordinating at once — never achieved for anything comparable, and harder every year as more countries hold Bitcoin themselves. The network survives laws; individual users don't always. That distinction is the honest heart of this page.