Indeed, cryptography for information transfer has been a successful technology. This is due to the work of many activists leveraging the prior existence of the

Indeed, cryptography for information transfer has been a successful technology. This is due to the work of many activists leveraging the prior existence of the fundamental rights related to communicating freely in the constitutions of many countries. Despite this, as you say, governments have tried to make laws around this, which are partly successful. But there is a crucial difference between cryptography for communication and cryptocurrencies. You have to provide an account of your financial activities at the end of the year to your government, and lying on it will get you in serious hot water. You don't have to annually tell the government who you communicated with and how. So, you using encryption technology will never land you in trouble, unless the government catches you. For instance, millions pirate copyright material around the world, but governments find it very difficult to catch the ones setting up the sharing sites. But any non-trivial usage of cryptocurrency has to be reported by you to the government, and if you don't the tax authorities will come after you. So the government at this point has close to complete control over which cryptocurrency transactions you can freely engage in, and which ones you can't.