> The privacy comes from the system being censorship resistant, so the platform itself can not require you to KYC yourself to the state in order to use it, or be shut down or blocked by the state.

That's definitely a good example of the sales pitch, but think about how it works in the real world:

1. Nobody wants random numbers, so you have to link your Bitcoin addresses to real world identities on every transaction. Anyone you deal with can deanonymize you if required or compromised, which means that if you actually have cause for concern this is not a system you can trust.

2. Almost all transactions will require conversion to real currency at an exchange. This is, of course, a great place for a government to require KYC since the exchanges and businesses in your country are subject to local laws.

3. The network requires an easily-blocked protocol to send large amounts of data on a continuous basis. This makes it easy for a government to block unapproved exchanges — and, of course, since trying to circumvent the system is effectively waving an “illegal activity here!” flag that means that any transactions you try to make over something like a VPN have a high level of risk unless they're parties which you are certain are fully outside of your government's control. How much do you really trust that guy who says he works for the resistance with your full transaction history?

4. The next point on the sales pitch is usually “use a tumbler” or “use separate wallets for everything”. These are impractical on a regular basis, guaranteeing that people will be compromised by mistakes and again have their full public transaction history linked, and there's a huge trust problem: do you really believe everyone you interact with will keep your identity history? Will you ever make a mistake and use the wrong wallet? Will you always have so much money available that you never need to transfer funds? What happens when the police search your phone and find a banned Bitcoin client, which is to say a signed confession? Are you certain the tumbler you're using isn't compromised or run by the police? What happens when the police find someone else using the same tumbler to launder money and now you're being charged as an accomplice for the mob and are trying to prove that you were just breaking the law for some lesser crime and had no knowledge of what those guys were doing?

None of that is practical: real people are not going to want or reliably keep some kind of strict opsec regimen AND they're not capable of vetting that the software is actually implementing the promised privacy features. If you actually care about censorship, the first questions you'd want to think more deeply about are how people discover and use this system: can you be certain that the exchange someone told you was private isn't a sting operation? Is the person you're trying to send money to really who you think, and operating with perfect opsec?

At every point, the answer is “it's safer to use real cash” because then at least your risk exposure is limited to a single transaction at a specific point in time rather than a retroactive unveiling of your lifetime history.

Now, that's not great and it'll be cool if someone does come up with a truly robust anonymous system but that is not and never will be Bitcoin so it's recklessly irresponsible to run around telling people that Bitcoin is good for privacy and censorship avoidance when it can never meet those goals. It's also irresponsible to tell people that some new thing which was just developed is safe to use when it'll take decades both to prove that and develop safe community practices around the tool — many of the approaches people have hypothesized are not known to be safe in the context of an adversary with significant network visibility or statistical analysis capacity.

The other thing to remember, as we've seen with cryptography, is that you need to look at the whole system. One very nice trait about cash is that it's a robust system: I don't need to analyze a complex software stack and operating network to understand the threat model. It doesn't help anyone if, say, someone comes up with a great anonymous coin system but the local government is actively promoting exchanges and apps which are compromised — and even if you really are correct in believing that your opsec will be perfect for life, that's probably not true of everyone you deal with.