In regards to all of the talk about banning encryption, I guess no one remembers the 90s any more. The cypherpunks won that battle in the past. The genie is out so far now that no one even remembers that there was a lamp before.
They did indeed, and the way they won it points to how we'll win this one. You build systems that everybody else uses and make them essential to the operation of the economy. Everybody depends on SSH and SSL, you can't censor dissidents without censoring everyone.
Metaphorically, you take the world's payment systems hostage, so that nobody can shoot Bitcoin without shooting something they care about.
Legitimate payments of taxpaying businesses, right there on the blockchain. Loads of them. Every corporation that owns a congressman should want to protect bitcoin. Every organization that mobilizes large numbers of voters should want to protect bitcoin. If someone suggests attacking the network to try to taint coins or cause some other kind of mischief, whether it's by creating regulations or setting up rival government-run nodes, they should get angry phone calls from every donor from Amazon to Walmart, and every charity from the NRA to the Salvation Army.
Bitcoin can do this, as long as we don't break the feature that makes it attractive to the great majority of people out there who will never be libertarians. And that feature is UNBELIEVABLY CHEAP ONLINE PAYMENTS.