Well, you need very little to use Bitcoin - basically, just internet access. And, potentially, you only need to smuggle as little as 250 bytes. Banking systems

Well, you need very little to use Bitcoin - basically, just internet access. And, potentially, you only need to smuggle as little as 250 bytes. Banking systems has more choke points. If money is on your bank account and it gets blocked, that's it, nothing can be done about it. With Bitcoin, even if internet in the entire country is blocked, you still have options: you can transmit data by phone. There are many ways to smuggle 250 bytes out of a country. You can also just memorize the mnemonic phrase (so-called brainwallet) and move yourself out. They won't find your bitcoins even if they strip-search you. (But if they know you have them, wrench attack might work, no defense against that if your privacy is compromised.) All the other things are not necessary for using cryptocurrency, they just need to happen somewhere. So the system can route around the damage. Mining is not possible in your country? That's OK, it will work as long as there's at least one country where mining is possible. So Bitcoin resilience is not about working when power is out, obviously. It is about giving people options to route around the damage. If your bank blocks you, you can't go to another bank to get money on your account, since that money resides within a particular bank. But Bitcoin is global - you can access your funds from any computer in any country, as long as you have a private key.