Agreed that it'll be discussed, but that's a hell of a precedent: outlawing legal transactions between private citizens in any specific currency. Given that Ci

Agreed that it'll be discussed, but that's a hell of a precedent: outlawing legal transactions between private citizens in any specific currency. Given that Citizens United held that money is speech, it seems there would be an obvious first amendment challenge to such a law. Not that I'd expect equal legal treatment for corporate super-PACs and a bunch of scruffy hackers. Bitcoin is doing very well. MtGox has ~300K USD being exchanged every day - that's at least that much worth of transactions in BTC (might be more depending on the rate bitcoins are recirculated). There are a LOT of different things one can buy with it. There's a real, boring, everyday economy going on. The value has doubled in the past year - there was a 40% drop in Aug12, but it recovered a third of that the very next day and since then has steadily grown back to that high. It's not bullion or anything, but neither is it crazy: in fact it's been a bit boring, and that's a very good thing in a currency. Smartphones are slowly taking over the world, as once they're as common as featurephones are now - say 5 years tops? - bitcoin becomes very useful in economies without proper banking systems, which is to say a whole lot of them! Even if the US manages to outlaw it, it's hard to see how they can stop it. EDIT: http://blockchain.info/charts/output-volume http://blockchain.info/charts/output-volume suggests total transactions are 1.9M BTC, which would be 27M USD, per day. Wowsers.