Some people may remember 'megauploads'.  The case is instructive.

As most here probably know, megauploads was a fairly generic file sharing locker, but one which happened to be especially successful.  At it's peak it accounted for a noticeable percentage of total global internet traffic.  Then, at the flip of a switch it was gone along with everyone's data who had been using the service no matter what the nature of the data.  Yes, the preponderance of the data probably was porn and copyrighted media, but certainly not all.

Additionally a special operations raid with helicopters and the whole works was undertaken to capture the geek who built the service.  The raid was performed by the Kiwi's, but under direction of their overloads in Washington.  The stated reason?  The guy once sent a private e-mail around asking if someone knew if/where a particular copyrighted movie that he wanted to watch might be to be had.  The guy and some of his employees spent a number of days in jail and to this day lives under threat of being extradited to the U.S.

This kind of action was driven by political machinations of a group of copyright owners centered in California.  The power they hold compared to the power of the global financial systems is tiny so it is completely anticipated that the level of pressure and the level of unfairness which Bitcoin could expect if we threaten the financial system in a noticeable way is enormous.  It would be folly to expect better treatment than Dotcom got.

Why was it so trivial to shut down megauploads?  All of the gear and networks that the service used were trivial to identify and valuable to the owners.  All the U.S. had to do was to tell the equipment owners to drop megauploads as a customer and they complied within minutes.  I remember pics of a Carpathia cage which was totally shut down and sitting idle in some datacenter while Dotcom's 'crimes' were investigated.  I think I may have seen that very cage with my own eyes when I was doing some work in an East Coast datacenter one time, but most of these cages look the same so I'm not sure.

Anyway, the upshot is that people who live under the assumption that somehow 'freedom' and 'fairness' is going to protect the Bitcoin network if the mainstream financial players, and thus U.S. govt, wants it shut down are living in a fantasy la-la-land.  There are several things which could keep it going:

 - It more useful alive than dead to the existing powers that be, and/or

 - It is decentralized and supported by gear which is both cloakable and dispensable by the operators.  There wound need be a lot of potential operators and they can be born anywhere and pop up anywhere overnight.

To me, Bitcoin is no stronger than it's ability to deal with an attack such as was undertaken against Kim Dotcom.  The megauploads attack was not some hypothetical.  It happend, and the power structures driving it have only become stronger and more totalitarian since that time.

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Well, lookee here what I found when seeing if I spelled Carpathia correctly:  http://carpathia.com/blog/vmware-vcloud-government-service-and-carpathia-achieves-fedramp-ato/  Looks like from a corporate perspective they made a good decision when they confiscated millions of user's data.