1. Internet access 2. Sales of computers 3. Imports 4. Citizens not revolting against that (including people using and accepting currency, so buy and sell side)
All of which are possible but not trivial. I actually think it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult to do this with a decentralised system like BitCoin than it is with fiat currency issued by a central bank.
Isn't China doing #1 - #4 to about 25% of the world's population already?
The fundamental problem is that it is incredibly hard to provide only some Internet access, be they a state actor, public school, parent, etc. The design of the protocols impairs censorship efforts.
If you want to censor the Internet, you pretty much have to start with a whitelist approach of allowed IPs and domains, and then stringently audit those to insure they don't act as proxies.
I agree the government doesn't get any benefit from decentralization and would just have a MySQL DB in real life to make corruption and whatnot easier, but cryptocurrencies only work if the government tolerates them.
What do you mean? Aren't they inherently tamperproof?
> how would they find those dealing everything in bitcoin?
A few people might live that way, but unless the entire supply chain is bitcoin someone will have to buy the food/gas/land they need with govcoin and sell it in bitcoin, thus getting caught.
> One of the reason of URSS going down was the huge administrative costs of spying / investigating, keeping up the oppression on its citizens.
Since ever single transaction is tracked, you can automate 90% of the work. Just look for businesses making the same amount of purchases but less sales, or people sending money to or getting money from accounts that aren't registered as employers or stores. With modern anomaly detection techniques you'd hardly have to torture anyone.
The USSR just didn't have modern technology. It would have taken a team of agents to tail a single person; the ARGUS-IS can track everyone in a 36 square mile area with a single drone.
I' extremely sceptical that people would do this. I most certainly wouldn't want to risk my life over one kind of (obscure) currency vs another.
This would be a waste of resources. If you're not going to be decentralized, it's way less complex to have a mysql DB of everyones bank accounts somewhere, and much easier to hide corruption.
They are only beneficial to establish a trustless data store. That is the only function they serve. If you don't need trustless consensus, you don't need or want a blockchain. If you are a state actor or some major corporation, you trust yourself already, and you don't need trustless data stores, and at corporate scale any interaction with other entities that might validly use trustless data (like money tracked between banks) has the entities involved capable of influencing force of law to maintain systemic trust.
That is why Zimbabwe citizens value it, and why a Fortune 500 or European state power doesn't need one.
Logic, people...
Not saying that’s what happened, just that logic hardly precludes it.
It is more resistant, perhaps, to detection than cash on hand in foreign currency (though not necessarily particularly more than a foreign currency account where access information is memorized, depending on the threat profile of concern.)
A foreign currency account is not as easy to setup as a brain wallet.
That's also true of caches of foreign currency in cash (not to mention remote accounts.)
Of course, the difficulty of the subject proving full compliance is more of a problem for the subject than the torturer.
It's not hard to see why bitcoin has its appeal, no?
Since I gave the reason (added difficulty in detection, not confiscation) upthread, no, it's not hard to see why it has appeal compared to foreign currency for non-current savings (if you are spending in the domestic economy, which is observable by the authorities, the advantage of Bitcoin is mitigated) under certain threat models.
You're not going to get everyone to use satellites to get data in and out. If you've ever been in an African country you'd know SMSs aren't on the cheap side either. You'd also know they have tools that can track and catch your VSAT dishes and fine you heavily.