I'm not the OP, but this from the Matt Levine newsletter last week, which I think is what he is getting at:

> 1. If you hold your coins at a regulated exchange, sure yeah the authorities can probably get a warrant and seize your Bitcoins.

> 2. If you hold your coins in your own wallet but you write down your private key in, like, your phone’s notes app, and it backs up to the cloud, then the authorities can probably get your cloud provider to give them access to your notes and read the key and use that to seize all your Bitcoins. (This happened to the alleged Bitfinex hack launderers.)

> 3. If you write your private key on a scrap of paper, the authorities can search your house until they find it and seize all your Bitcoins.

> 4. If you memorize your private key, or just write it down somewhere really safe, then they can arrest you and throw you in jail until you tell them what it is, and then seize all your Bitcoins.

This is ignoring that 3 and 4 are still improvements.

This argument is similar to me saying there is no point to encrypted communications because the government can hack it, plant back doors, throw you in jail, etc. That is all true, but making the government’s job harder, even if not theoretically impossible for a nation state, is still something that is worthwhile.

Ah gotcha. Agree that no one man is going to stop a nation state from using Physical violence to achieve their goal.