critique:  Governments won't simply allow a non-state money to keep growing. Control over money is too central to a government's survival for them to allow this.

rebuttal:  Bitcoin's decentralized nature makes it impossible for anyone, even governments, to fully kill it. Given that it will always exist, the dynamic becomes one of "jurisdictional arbitrage,"; i.e., if one government makes owning bitcoin fully illegal with harsh penalties, other governments will embrace the opportunity to become home to bitcoin-related businesses, investors, etc.

Furthermore, the cat's out of the bag, so to speak. In the US, several members of congress already own bitcoin, and the list of elected (and unelected) officials who take pro-bitcoin stances publicly is getting longer. Additionally, the false-narrative that Bitcoin is popular for illicit activity is being challenged by career US intelligence officials, plus in April 2021, the US House Minority Leader positioned bitcoin as geo-politically important to the United States.

Additionally, adoption of bitcoin and cryptoassets continues to grow rapidly. The Cambridge Judge Business School's 3rd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study found that in Q3 2020, there were an estimated 101 million unique identity-verified accounts at crypto service firms (exchanges, wallets) globally. This is up from an estimated 35 million such accounts in 2018, and does not include the likely significant expansion that's occurred in Q4 2020 and so far in 2021 as bitcoin and crypto markets have rapidly attracted new interest. Furthermore, the Cambridge study tracks identity-verified users only. The bitcoin and crypto-ecosystem is likely much wider. Since BTC is a bearer asset, and can be self-custodied, users who exclusively hold their own bitcoin and who don't use services that require identity-verification will not show up on these studies, and may represent a very large portion of total bitcoin users. The larger the portion of the electorate who has a stake in bitcoin, the more politically difficult it becomes to attack it.

Finally, the 2nd half of 2020, and early 2021, have seen a rapid broadening of bitcoin exposure, and positive bitcoin sentiments, coming from deep-pocketed backers with lobbying power. These include numerous multi-billion-dollar, and even mutli-trillion-dollar, fund managers taking BTC positions, corporates like MicroStrategy, Square, and Tesla putting BTC on their balance sheets, and major banks and financial services providers such as BNY Mellon, Fidelity, PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard offering bitcoin-related services. Bitcoin is rapidly embedding itself into both the financial plumbing, as well as corporate and major funds' balance sheets, thus making it far more politically difficult to attack too aggressively, and this momentum shows no signs of slowing down.