This is sort of the reason BTC is so interesting. Throughout all of human history everything has ultimately relied on jackbooted thugs or the implication thereof to secure title. A reliable distributed ledger is fundamentally new. Sure, you can be threatened physically, but how do they actually link you to your holdings if you're smart about it? And if your locality is threatening people who use it, you go somewhere where they aren't and retrieve your encrypted wallet from cloud storage. BTC's biggest use case is capital flight IMO.