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Bitcoin’s decentralization has provided Bitcoin with censorship-resistant properties. Governments and certain central agencies have the authority to freeze citizens' bank accounts or confiscate their gold, however, it is impossible for authorities to freeze or confiscate people’s Bitcoin if people keep their Bitcoin private keys (password) private.
The censorship-resistance properties of Bitcoin are particularly important for people living under authoritarian regimes. According to recent statistics, 53% of people live under some sort of authoritarian regime. For example, the central bank of Nigeria freezed the bank accounts of twenty people after they protested police brutality.
It is not surprising to see people living under authoritarian regimes adopt Bitcoin to avoid their money being freezed or confiscated by the governments and central banks.
The graph on the left shows that in Nigeria, 32% of people own cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin. The reason behind such high rate of cryptocurrency ownership can be to prevent their authoritarian regime from confiscating their money or freeze it.
Moreover, the founder of Bitcoin has maintained his anonymity and does not have a parent company. Instead, the Bitcoin network is maintained by over 160,000 individual miners that validate transactions and keep the network online, and many open source developers that maintain it’s software and make sure it’s bug free.
The anonymity of Bitcoin’s founder and the lack of a parent company makes it impossible for any authority to shut down Bitcoin by placing legal regulations on the company or prosecuting it’s founder. Moreover, the large number of miners and the diversity of their geographical locations make it impossible for any government to shut down Bitcoin by banning its mining. For example, when China banned Bitcoin mining around May 2021, the Bitcoin miners simply relocated to different countries. The graph below reflects the shift in hashrate (Bitcoin mining activity) that happened after China banning Bitcoin.
Therefore, individual decisions made by countries to ban Bitcoin mining do not result in a shutdown in Bitcoin’s network.
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