At the end of the day, you are attempting to create decentralization on a centralized network. That is the crux of it all. The Internet is 'open' to the extend that ISPs allow it to be. Remember that it was born out of needing a military solution for communication. 
They like stuff locked down.
Politicians want centralization. The military actually doesn't want centralization. The concept of decentralized networks originate from the military particularly because they actually work.
Centralization benefits politicians, not necessarily always national security. The military specifically has an entire study of warfare based on leaderless networks. The military pioneered the study of asymmetric warfare, UAVs, all of the encryption we talk about, all comes from and was used to support military operations. So I would say the government isn't monolithic, and you have people in the government who genuinely care about winning wars more than politics, and who genuinely care more about operational security than politics, and if you can produce a technology which can help them win and improve operational security then it will be accepted.
The Internet was necessary in the context of a Cold War.
Anyhow, a few cursory mentions of mesh network have been made, something that I am very familiar with in creating solutions for harsh environments to bring Internet access there.
The US government has a technology called disruption tolerent networks, these are unique military grade mesh networks for use in emergency situations. To this date the US government and US military are on the forefront.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-tolerant_networkingAnonymous currency doesn't intrigue them as much because they never had a problem transferring value anonymously, but there could be situations where if a currency were truly anonymous (not the stuff we have now), then maybe it would become something militarily interesting. On the other hand I'm not sure that is a development we would want because interesting in the military context often isn't good for civilian safety.
There is some merit to it, the problem is you are essentially creating a whole new infrastructure. Anybody got a few trillion in their back pocket connect several billion people?
We have many trillions actually. The amount of wealth we have which goes untapped is primarily due to the fact that 1) we aren't currently able to sell our unused computation resources, 2) we aren't currently able to sell our unused storage resources, 3) we aren't currently able to sell our unused bandwidth, 4) we aren't currently able to auction our attention.
The interesting development is all of this is changing as we speak. A year from now we will have DACs which take full advantage of micropayments and once you bring micropayments operational, combined with the other elements I mentioned, there are easily trillions of dollars of wealth there. So I don't think there is any sort of wealth shortage, just the misdirection and centralization of that wealth, or in some cases people don't even recognize that what they have is a form of wealth. Attention is wealth, spare computing resources are wealth, knowledge is wealth, all can be turned into cryptocurrency.
It would only work with wirless connectivity of communities. ISPs own the hard lines, and those ISPs have upstreams that are owned by the handful of companies that provide the backbone to the internet.
Drones, UAVs, blimps, all can provide access to satellite Internet. DTN can also create a mesh network on the ground. It might not be as fast but it would be good enough to do stuff. You also have the wireless spectrum which isn't even being used.
If crypto suddenly is accounting for some % of GDP to a government, would it be in their best interest to censor it? Politicians are dumb, they would either ignore it, or would want to find a way to tax it and or make it grow for more tax. Why censor it?
I could be wrong, maybe someone will put in a worker proposal to spend a few trillion on building out nodes worldwide to connect everyone and have it all owned by the blockchain in the end. At that stage though.. we might need worker proposals for tanks, missiles, and drones to defend them from governments. 
Here is how it seems to work, you have the political side of the government which cares a lot about societal stability. They are the side which is most concerned about Bitcoin and anything else which could be disruptive or have negative social impacts. Then you have sides of the government which cares about science, or military operations, and they are focused on their objectives which might not even be domestic.
The side of the government most concerned about social instability is obviously the FBI. The FBI is also very concerned about encryption, because their mission is to enforce laws and stop crimes. The NSA and military on the other hand could care less because it's not their mission to concern themselves with domestic politics.
In order to be successful in growing a technology you at least have to know the stakeholders, and you have to know what each has to lose or gain from your technology. The entire US government isn't a single entity, and there are different groups which gain or lose with different technologies. Encryption is very popular with certain parts of the government and then hated by other parts. Law enforcement in particular hates encryption because their mission forces them to hate it, while the NSA loves encryption when it's American citizens using it but hates it when anyone else is using it.
The NSA by their mission is not supposed to spy on American citizens. Most of the time they don't, and they follow their mission.
Topic: Looking for well stated arguments for why the government cannot censor crypto (Read 9451 times)
