I know much of the discussion around Bitcoin has always been that the Governments of the world can't shut down bitcoin because of it's peer to peer nature.
This much is pretty true, but I want to point out the fact that they don't have to shut down Bitcoin, but they can effectively turn it off anyway.
All they need to do the same thing they did to Iran, North Korea and everyone else they don't like... in those countries they basically attacked their central bank and made conversions from each respective currency to something else far more difficult.
In our case they do the same thing to Mt.Gox and any other exchange they want to.
bitcoin won't shut down, but buying and selling them would head underground along with volume and liquidity. What would that take, a list of 5-6 exchanges... and now everyone is forced to use face to face transactions and cash type exchanges?
My point is that they don't have to shut down bitcoin to shut down bitcoin.... hell even the underground sites like Silk Road would disappear to a large extent because the sellers there wouldn't be able to easily convert their currency into whatever the grocery store in their area accepts.. (and it wouldn't be bitcoin in that place because the grocery store would run into the same problem).
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't send my bank account info though a faceless peer to peer system as they don't have the same level of protection that bitcoin does (which was designed for that).
How do they stop Bitcoin 2.0, Litecoin, PPcoin, Memcoin, Zerocoin, and anything else?
They attack Bitcoin and there will just be more coins, more protocols, more hardware, better algorithms, and possibly even more financial and intellectual support.
Bitcoin may go but cryptocurrencies are here to stay in one form or another.
