Banks are blocking transfers to and from exchanges here in the U.S., too. It's mostly the huge banks--the ones that were "too big to fail" back during the bailouts of the Bush administration. Paypal has also been shutting down accounts for cryptocurrency transactions.

I think a good way to get merchants to accept crypto is just to offer to pay them in crypto. A lot of them will decline, but then if you have a good rapport with them and continue offering each time you make a transaction, they might come around eventually. And it seems that as soon as someone receives their first bit of crypto, nine times out of ten, they're hooked. However, this method means actually spending some of your crypto, and that's a hard sell for hodlers.

I have confidence that decentralization will win out in the end. Cryptocurrencies aren't going anywhere, I know that much. But it is still within the power of governments and the global banking industry to make things real hard on us for a time, until we get our peer-to-peer systems in place.