Isn’t the issue though that sure, you can retreat into Nostr and Bitcoin but lets say they’re illegal, how is that going to change your life in the real world. If you’re just a pseudonym on a protocol and have value in bitcoin that you can’t spend… I can see how this might give you hope and be a path to revolution but it doesn’t help your immediate reality. I know patience is key but there at least has to be a path visible
Discussion
I mean, is unplugging from the matrix or whatever you call it enough? I think eventually you have to have heroes in the real world
I think you've answered your own question below when you said about unplugging from the matrix. That means you are in the real world. Bitcoin is technically illegal now in the sense that it's not legal tender, and yet that doesn't prevent you and another person from agreeing to transact in Bitcoin. Same thing with Nostr, if it's illegal, it will be up to people to just decide to use it anyway, but for ethically sound reasons that don't break anything morally enforceable laws. If enough people do that, an illegitimate government which had made that protocol illegal would crumble in days. And that's why they won't ban it, because they know the ban would weaken them.
They can ban X in Brazil because they know it doesn't weaken them. X isn't a protocol, it's a platform, so it's not morally neutral. Banning Bitcoin and Nostr wouldn't be like banning X.
Kind of like Winston and Julia in 1984 though. They agreed to transact secretly, and were discovered. The tension in the novel is even that maybe Julia is an Inner Party member, and the slap to both of them is that they don’t even betray each other, but the prole who rents them the room, the elderly Mister Charrington is an undercover member of the Thought Police.
Although not necessary by that point, a less total State could have held a public exhibition of the torture of Winston and Julia to quell any thoughts of defecting.
As Boromir might say, one does not simply opt out of totalitarianism.