I was just being glib - but in an ideal world that number should be 0. Any political dissidents that are willing to write their entire transaction history in plaintext on a slow, small public ledger are going to end up in political prison in a hot minute. They're just waiting for automated tooling to file a report with the secret police.

Bitcoin is not the tool you should be using for that. It's just poor opsec.

Do you have any evidence that this number is nonzero?

Edit: I don't have direct evidence of saving lives (e.g. somebody bribed a guard with bitcoin in order to escape execution), but it's not hard to argue that these resistance organizations do save lives.

* https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/09/09/belarus-nonprofit...

* https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/10/16/nigerian-banks-shut...

* https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/07/15/russian-activists...

* https://wikileaks.org/

It has niche uses, but so would any other non-PoW crypto or a CBDC.