While all this brouhaha sounds ominous, there is little they can really do. There is no legal standing (nor logical reasoning) to consider Bitcoin any more of a threat than any other payment system. There will soon be a tipping point where government is seen as bullying Bitcoiners and some other nation will step in as a voice of reason. Smart money will go there (hello France, Iceland, Japan, India, and others). Until there is more than breast-beating, this is a good time to get cheap bitcoins.
Here's a test: One of the greatest potential threats about Bitcoin is *gasp* kidnapping with a ransom in Bitcoin. It's the perfect crime, right? Yet nobody has done so. Why? Because Bitcoin is not good for that. If Bitcoin was so great for narcotics, then why aren't the cartels using it? Because it's not good for that. Bitcoin is not good for crime. It is not anonymous. It *is* private. There is a difference. Maybe they are more afraid of privacy than anything else. Are you listening NSA?
All of these posts are FUD. If the US was trying to stop Bitcoin so would all of it's allies so there would be no where to go. But the US wont try to stop Bitcoin for the same reason Russia and China haven't stopped the Internet. Bitcoin is just too useful, and too important to be stopped.
Government regulation on the other hand is welcome. People who don't want any regulation are the ones fear mongering because they are worried about their Silkroad being shut down but the vast majority of people coming into Bitcoin now are speculators, investors, business owners, gamblers, but not the drug addicted paranoid of the government crowd who were into Bitcoin in 2011-2012. Bitcoin now is in a completely different era and while it's still early adopter innovator stage the attitudes will change over time.
The originators were cypherpunk grad student and hacker types. Then you had the drug users and dark net types who came in right around the time when Bitcoin was announced to be supported by Wikileaks (which also happend to be the time that Satoshi left the scene). Then you had Gavin speaking with the CIA in 2012 right around the peak of the Bitcoin darknet era. That was also a few months after the FBI report which you can find on Wired.
Now the era is changing into the more professional era where you have businesses forming, people actually are getting rich now and speculators and a new generation of innovators are becoming involved. The new generation have the goal of mainstreaming Bitcoin and of upping the price as much as possible because the new generation are businessmen. Previous generations who were more about being pseudo-revolutionaries (the darknet generation) or the technological intellectuals (the satoshi generation), have differing views. Some of the satoshi generation want Bitcoin to be mainstream because they have or will have millions of dollars worth in Bitcoin and its all useless if they cannot spend it anywhere except on Silkroad.
These people want to be able to live on Bitcoins and you simply cannot do that if it's not regulated. Then you have the revolutionaries and darknet crowd who never intended to have any legitimate use for the currency and who just want some anonymous form of money for their revolution or to buy drugs. And the newest generation the professionals are busy trying to push Bitcoin into the mainstream so their businesses can profit and they can become millionaires like the satoshi generation, and generally speaking they don't care about Silkroad.
There are different common reasons why people get involved with Bitcoin but I'll list some.
1. The beauty of the technology. (this reason attracts the college students and nerds)
2. The politics, how it protects civil liberties. (this is what attracted the darknet generation and they are concerned with Wikileaks, funding Snowden, and all that)
3. The people who want to start their own businesses and never have to work a 9-5 again (the people who saw Bitcoin as attractive to invest in, or who want to run businesses).
It's possible to be part of all three camps but it's important to know there are different camps and all camps support Bitcoin for different reasons. The political darknet oriented camps are the only ones in my opinion who are terrified of regulation. For their camp it's an existential threat and goes against every reason they are involved with Bitcoin.
It is my opinion that the governments are really only targeting that crowd. If you're into Bitcoin because you want to fund Wikileaks or give money to Snowden then don't be surprised if you get put on some FBI watch list. The regulation is not being put in place because the government is worried about Charlie Lee at Coinbase, or about mom and pop investor trying to shift some of their savings into Bitcoin. The FBI/DHS are targeting the people who are part of the dark net generation going around talking about how the government is evil and how revolution is necessary.
For the record I don't trust the government either but I also don't agree with some of the extreme and stupid positions I read sometimes. Regulation for me wouldn't be so bad and if you're so afraid of regulation perhaps you have something you're trying to hide from the authorities but not all of us do.
