The Empire Strikes Back: India Pulls The Plug On Cryptos, by John Rubino.

One of the unsurprising but still kind of alarming beliefs of early cryptocurrency adopters was that governments were powerless to stop them. They expected an unimpeded rise to dominance while existing fiat currencies withered away like vacuum tubes in the age of microprocessors. …

Sorry, no. If a government-run cryptocurrency is a country’s “legal tender,” then private-sector cryptos might be defined as counterfeit and their owners treated as criminals. In effect, that’s a ban within an ecosystem where only the official cryptocurrency is allowed to circulate.

This kind of government response is to be expected because no one gives up power voluntarily, and today’s central banks have the ultimate power, which is the ability to make money appear out of thin air. That’s how governments can maintain vast militaries and cradle-to-grave entitlement systems without taxing their productive classes into oblivion and/or rebellion. …

But the war isn’t over. Fiat currencies are clearly failing and cryptos are clearly part of what comes after. True-believers’ initial expectations were just unrealistic, and the real action might have to wait until some major fiat currencies implode.