1. Russia's problem is that other countries are choosing not to do business with them. The mechanism doesn't change that (China and India will do business, at a hefty discount, but that's true for gold, too) and Bitcoin adds some risks because the blockchain model is perfect for enabling censorship because it not only allows people to avoid transactions with sanctioned entities up front but adds retroactive risk: if you accept Bitcoin from someone on that list your transactions and everyone downstream can also be blocked, driving down the value of those coins and reducing your potential buyers.
2. If your concern is censorship by the government where you live, think very carefully about whether you'd want to be someone in Russia using an application which requires a great deal of very easily detected network activity and maintains a full public transaction history for the convenience of the cops who just illegally searched your phone. Each time someone you've interacted with is compromised, they now have a hard record to go after everyone else in their history so you're not just at risk at the time of the transaction (as with cash) but for years afterwards, hoping that nobody you know has been compromised and wondering whether the police are monitoring you to see whether you lead them to anyone more interesting.
It's great if Facebook is censoring you, but it doesn't seem strong enough to protect you all that strongly against someone bigger who can just shut down a platform if they don't like the content it allows.
Bitcoin does have a use in some places with no other alternatives, but I'm sure glad I'm not forced into that position with their unpredictable fees that often go way above credit card fees.
Sure its a little different than most payment providers where the person initiating the payment pays the fees, but the fees are well under credit card rates.
Credit cards are 2 to 4 percent.
Most people pay their only large payments(Rent and bills) with cheaper direct transfer schemes from zero to a few USD.
For a 16 dollar fee to be better than 3%, you would have to spend 480USD in one transaction, on the kind of thing that you'd normally have a fee at all for. Something I have only done an extremely small handful of times in my entire life.
A few of my more well off friends might have computer parts or jewelry worth that much. My laptop is the only single thing I own close to that price, and even then, it's not much over it.
For a trip to the grocery store for a single person, bitcoin would probably be a 8% to 20% fee.
Flat fees are a regressive sales tax.
In the middle you have the space where you can do BTC to BTC transactions with somewhat smaller fees, sure.
As an example, Coinbase charges reasonable withdrawal fees that correspond to the actual TX fee, around $0.05 when I last used it a few weeks ago. Others charge absurdly high fees, biggest examples of that being Binance and Bitstamp that charged ~$20 for a Bitcoin withdrawal around the same time Coinbase was charging $0.05.
Point being, different exchanges charge different fees, and LocalBitcoins is always an option if you want to avoid exchanges altogether.
tell that to the russians right now, or to all the other 3. world countrys whose only hope for usable currency is bitcoin