Bitcoin was originally designed to operate within all legal frameworks and work within regulation. This still exists in the form of original Bitcoin BSV. The Segwit BTC fork off of Bitcoin (still erroneously called Bitcoin by exchanges) has decided that it wants to move power and value away from miners and to a US-based company that controls the Lightning Network protocol. (I’d call Lightning a side chain, but it’s not even a chain; much worse, it’s just a messy system of payment channels off the BTC blockchain). In addition to the security challenges (miners will stop mining the BTC chain) and restriction against true scaling of Bitcoin’s blockchain, this creates another currency system that is controlled by people inside the US.

The US government has long maintained that any transaction taking place anywhere in the world is subject to US law merely by being transacted in US money. Its courts have also extended jurisdiction to any website domains, such as .com, managed by Internet registries in the US, and frequently even foreign companies using such domains. It is no stretch to believe that all cryptocurrencies centrally managed from inside the US will also soon fall into this same position – which is highly questionable under other countries’ and international laws.

This issue will also affect Ripple which has centralized control by one company (Ripple Labs) in the US. Like BTC/Lightning, Ripple operates like a company with central command in the US.

Ethereum, in addition to not scaling, has planned a technical road map away from Proof of Work to less secure and more centralized Proof of Stake, and also has significant US exposure in its team. The only real use for Ethereum today is as an enabling technology for scammy and illegal ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings or unregulated and illegal security tokens).