It's mind boggling that 12 years later, people like the parent poster are still claiming bullshit like that when there's literally zero evidence, rather the opposite. No country with underdeveloped banking and payment systems is interested in something like Bitcoin. They need something cheap and efficient, federated and... centralized! Many African countries are perfectly fine using M-Pesa.
It's hard for some first-world country citizens to imagine that.
Telling these people to use Bitcoin is just giving their government another tool to send them to jail.
But what happens when he bans all exchanges that off-board cryptocurrencies to Ruble? Will the opposition be happy with tokens that are suddenly useless for day-to-day expenses?
The real threat is police baiting users of such exchanges into sending or receiving funds. But we're yet to see such activity from them.
And using Bitcoin as a workaround against authoritarian governments sounds pretty risky to me. Everything leaves a trace on the blockchain and it's fairly easy to control (and ban) conversion to/from fiat currency. Going back to peer-to-peer barter is something, I guess, but I don't think we should celebrate that.
to think like this is mind boggling, try to relax, do some research (no, not reading news or opinion articles), and you will find your evidence
also: if smarter people than you are mostly pro-something, perhaps there is something else to it, stop thinking like a 5 year old trying to save the world from some made up monster no one else can see