At the risk of stealing @Undisciplined's beat, I found this Mises article interesting. It's a pretty skeptical view of the idea that Bitcoin can resist the state. And, while I disagree with the author, I find that his criticisms are useful.

This sounds like exactly what we are looking for:

The Islamic Republic of Iran, for instance, was not destabilized by digital currencies. Instead, the state apparatus systematically commandeered its domestic energy grid to industrialize Bitcoin mining, capturing an estimated 4.5 percent of the global hashrate to transmute trapped natural gas reserves into liquid capital. By co-opting the Nakamoto consensus, the regime bypassed the SWIFT system and evaded international blockades, processing upwards of $8 billion through global exchanges like Binance.

But this does not:

Meanwhile, the state criminalized the civilian population’s access to those exact same networks. Following Iran’s brutal January 2026 massacre and the subsequent February war blackout, the authoritarian apparatus did not bother attempting to decipher cryptographic traffic; they simply executed a devastating severing of the nation’s digital lifeline. By enforcing an 88-day blackout—nearly 2,100 continuous hours—dissidents were violently marooned. Whether capital was held on custodial exchanges or secured in self-custodied hardware wallets, their assets remained cryptographically secure but practically useless—incapable of purchasing food or organizing clandestine transport—proving that absolute control over network nodes renders a decentralized ledger politically irrelevant.

The author points out that the state can beat the shit out of you at any time it likes.

The state has no need to crack a private key; it cracks the person holding it. Coercion flows through flesh—imprisonment, family targeting, physical immobility—or simply through severing the infrastructure that makes broadcasting a transaction possible. An encrypted key grants its holder perfect cryptographic sovereignty and zero political agency.

This isn't exactly a revelation. We've been talking about five dollar wrenches since before Bitcoin (even if they were rubber hoses back then). The Bitcoin answer I might raise in reply is that Bitcoin will reduce the state's ability to fund its particular brand of arbitrary violence.

However, the author sees this as a woefully inadequate:

The structural friction Bitcoin introduces operates entirely in the economic register; it cannot reach the coercive register where sovereignty actually resides. A monopoly on violence is not negotiated away in the marketplace of ideas, nor subverted simply because capital is reallocated into an unhackable database.

My view of the state is certainly that they operate like thugs, and will ignore any laws or norms they like. The worst consequence for the state is a lawsuit, not so for an individual.

So: do we believe in the axiom of resistance or do we not?