I don't see anything particularly hard about regulating bitcoins.
You're registering your wallets with your government and that's about it. Bitcoin is fully transparent, so government can track every transaction and if you're doing transaction to some non-verified wallet, you have to explain it to your government.
I would argue that bitcoins are even easier to track than bank accounts.
What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.
If the entire world will bend under US regulations and will respect their white-lists and black-lists, it might be an issue. But that means losing independence (because surely US won't respect Russian blacklists) and plenty of countries won't agree with that. So there will always be escape routes as long as you're physically outside of the US.
Come on. It also takes a couple of USD cents (per operation) for the government to automatically blacklist all wallets that "touched" (received any amount of transfer from) a blacklisted walled. The great advantage of BTC is that the ledger is public...
Blacklisting addresses based on where they received money from doesn't make any sense. Blacklisted wallets can just send microcents (dust) to whitelisted wallets, which would now have to be blacklisted as well.
You can make it illegal to use Bitcoin, but it was designed to make it practically impossible to enforce such a ban.
"If you transact with these blacklisted wallets, your wallet also automatically becomes blacklisted, and if we find you then you go to jail. As an exception - if you receive any amount of BTC from a blacklisted walled, you have 7 days to send the same amount (or greater) to [this government wallet] and that will erase all your legal liability and make your wallet whitelisted again. We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys. Alternatively, register email/phone numbers with us and we'll notify you when your wallet is blacklisted, and tell you how much BTC you should pay us"
So people need to watch all their wallets every 7 days? What if it's a cold storage wallet that is 2of3 signature protected and signatories are in different countries? What if you go on several weeks vacation? What if it's in a vault along with your gold, are you going to walk to the bank every week, open the vault, load the keys, then export them to some other cold storage? What if you have a virus that makes you have to restore large chunks of your infrastructure from backups that takes longer than a week? This is simply ridiculous. What you propose is just not realistic, no one who deals with crypto often will ever think that this is a solution.
> We can even automate the process for you if you trust us enough to give us your wallet keys.
Haha seriously? Your solution is that people give their private keys to the government? You must have no experience with crypto or what it's about it all. Nor really experience with how the government works and how often it gets corrupt. A corrupt clerk now is a small nuissance, a corrupt clerk in your proposed scenario means that thousands of addresses get stolen of all of their tokens. There is zero chance that this scenario will ever be implemented in any meaningful way.
So it would be enough to send any amount to any public wallet to make it blacklisted and additionally also make SWAT teams come to the owners of those accounts? Yeah "good idea" /s. You know there is no way to prevent receiving bitcoins right?
You can receive every time with a new address generated by HD Wallet.
But transmission can only happen from an address which has positive balance. And after receiving the money, destination balance becomes positive, and you are bound to use that destination address as a source to transfer assets further.
You're registering your wallets with your government and that's about it. Bitcoin is fully transparent, so government can track every transaction and if you're doing transaction to some non-verified wallet, you have to explain it to your government.
I would argue that bitcoins are even easier to track than bank accounts.
What government can't do is to steal your money or block your access to your money.