Why Bitcoin Was Never Banned
Network State Conference 2026 · 9 Oct 2026 · 4:05
Maxime Desalle, an analyst at Winklevoss Capital, argues that states never needed to ban Bitcoin because AI-assisted surveillance is turning it into a tool for watching its users. He explains why Zcash would be far harder to ban: holding it is a seed phrase, receiving it needs only an address, spending and converting run through swaps and decentralized exchanges, wallets are open source, and ten years of proof of work built a committed culture, at Network State Conference 2026.
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From Network State Conference 2026, hosted by Network School.
Transcript
[music] So, Bitcoin was never banned. Um, and there's a good reason for that. The the state didn't need to. And if you think about it, had the states were if the state were really worried about Bitcoin, it would have figured out a way to to ban it. But it didn't. And the reason for that is because with AI and with increasingly better surveillance algorithms, Bitcoin is turning into a true surve
surveillance machine. And compared to CBDC's which are very unpopular, people willingly buy into Bitcoin and willingly enter this 360 degree uh panopticon. And there's only one currency that they would really have to ban and it also happens to be the one currency in the world that they cannot ban and that's Ccash. And the reason why is because Zcash, unlike Bitcoin, is private. And money that can be seen can be seized.
But when you make it private, that stops being the case. So you can't you can't ban Zcash for many different reasons. And you can't ban holding it because holding Zcash is just having a seat phrase. And that seat phrase is just a piece of text which you could either memorize or you could write it on a piece of paper or you could represent it as an image um digitally. Um so you can't spend holding it, you can't spend receiving it because similar to a seed phrase, an address is a piece of text which um can be communicated through encrypted channels, can be
represented through a QR code. um that's just impossible to ban. It's free speech. you can't ban spending its because even if you were to successfully um remove Zcash from all stores, all restaurants and block it there, as long as a single cryptocurrency is accepted at at one of these places, you can still spend Zcash because you can swap your Zcash in one transaction over to the currency accepted and pay that way. And speaking of converting, you can't ban converting because we now have decentralized exchanges like Near Intense, for example, that allow you to
seamlessly swap in and out of Zcash. You also can't ban the wallets because the wallets are open source. You can compile that code locally. And on top of that, nowadays with LLMs, with one prompt, you can create a new wallet instantly, including with open source LLMs. And then finally, and most importantly, you can't ban the culture. 10 years of proof of work. 10 years where the Zcash issuance went to the most diehard, hardcore believers in encryption and privacy. There's no way to replicate that and there's no way to ban that.
And so this is really why unlike Bitcoin, Zcash is truly unstoppable money. And that unlike Bitcoin, the state will try eventually probably to go after Zcash and it will fail because unlike Bitcoin, Zcash is unbanable. Thank you very much.