The typical counterargument is something like "well what about Saudi Arabia", but I think it's pretty easy for an oppressive regime to just say "you can't use cryptocurrency" and punish you severely for it--to the degree you won't.
Anyway, I just don't think cryptocurrency is a solution to this, and even if it is it's antidemocratic.
But your gov banned wikileaks bank accounts in the past and that is the perfect example of the case when the gov is definitely is a malicious actor (while their behaviour perfectly rational from their side of things).
Govs do war crimes, mass espionage and human rights violations. That should be addressed as well.
The government is persecuting WikiLeaks financially because that is easy to do. Even if a cryptocurrency were to take off as a currency and still be untraceable, the government would just move on to some other form of persecution. The real problem to be addressed is the persecution of a useful legitimate organization by an ostensibly democratic government. The form that persecution takes is secondary.
That hasn't worked yet for Wikileaks. If this worked and/or was the best way to deal with the types of problems Wikileaks is exposing, there would be no need for Wikileaks to exist.
The reason Wikileaks does exist is because, typically, when we attempt to address atrocities "democratically" we get nowhere.
On the other hand...
> Inventing a new currency that is, for a little while, hard to track by the government
This _has_ worked for Wikileaks in the past. When the US persecuted Wikileaks, Bitcoin helped to heavily negate the immediate impact of this action.
> The form that persecution takes is secondary.
In that case, why can't the form that Wikileaks' solutions take be secondary as well? If we are in agreement that Wikileaks is an important organization, then when addressing atrocities "democratically" fails, what would be wrong with short-term innovation?
Not quite. We assume that government is controlled by the people and thus I have some influence in its operation. The state often does truly horrible things, but so do plenty of organizations that I cannot control at all. I'll take the one that I have some degree of influence on.
People make mistakes, some of them are greedy, powerful people want to keep their power, etc..
You can't fix people with a currency.
And humans are creative, if you switch over to crypto, they'll find a new way of doing the same old things..
My government not wanting me to send money somewhere: Well, this might be a clichè, but apart from slightly limiting my freedom this prevents bad guys doing nasty stuff aswell.
Bad guys get around it one or the other way. You do not.
Or, not quite at hyperinflation, but your government is enacting policies based on MMT or similar and you are worried that this could hurt you (as a holder of the currency) in the long-run.
Or, maybe you're worried about governments being able to dictate what you are allowed to purchase with "their" money.
Or, maybe you want to send your money somewhere your government doesn't want you to send it (or their government doesn't want the other party to get it).
Obviously there is a lot more to cryptocurrency than just "not being issued by a government" as well though. There is general privacy benefits (Monero) or the promise of innovation if you have programmable money / contracts (Ethereum).