[lxdesk]

It's a fantasy to think that authoritarian governments actually succeed at this. Every one of them ends up with an underground market despite tremendous repression. Even literal prisons have one. At best, such governments have flare-ups of the condition where they murder in great numbers for a time to send everyone into terror, but in time they tire of it and calm down. The market pops right back up like a weed.

The analogy you should be looking at is the printing press, because it broadened the scope of such markets; what a person of higher literacy communicates is illegible to the lower. And such is true of a system of account that renders a larger scope of transactions illegible. The possession of great wealth itself is a concept that assumes a top-down vision of value; the phenomenon of being robbed for cryptocurrency is mostly reflective of the new being imitative of the old. But if they're all tokens, and anyone can make them - well, then, that means we increasingly don't have a man at the top. If the scrip you pay your police doesn't buy them anything at the market, they aren't going to be very motivated to take out fingernails for you.