I want to also say that one of the reasons that worried me about bitcoin originally was that I could not see how the US government would allow bitcoin to be an alternative form of payment. I saw what they did to those people who owned "egold" I believe or something like that. The government went in and raided them and shut them down. The China thing doesn't surprise me that much, but what does surprise me is that the US government supposedly seems more accepting to bitcoin than I would have expected in 2011.
We have now seen proof of how a government of an economically prominent country could allow Bitcoin to explode upwards, tacitally encouraging it's growth, before turning viciously upon it and decapitating it. If the Chinese government could have such an effect, just think what the US government could do.
Bring Bitcoin right into the public domain, bring it to the point where even yer grandma is making Bitcoin transactions on her mobile phone, allow its value to dramatically increase through a series of mini booms n busts, albeit with the same old state favoured financial institutions actually owning market dominating shares of Bitcoin. Insignificant boom bust cycles, until it is firmly lodged in public psyche that in the long run, Bitcoin can only ever go up. Sooner or later, vast amounts of wealth from the richest to the poorest people in the world start pouring into Bitcoin, at which point, Jp Morgue and Goldman Sachs start unloading surplus Bitcoin, keeping back just enough to trigger a massive crash, at which point the US government steps in and hits Bitcoin with highly restrictive legislation 'to protect the people', thus causing vast amounts of 'wealth' to evaporate into dust, leaving everyone totally impoverished.
At this point, it will have been proven that decentralised currencies left to the whim of free market forces don't work. But fortunately the western financial establishment are here to save us, with their own centrally controlled crypto currency, that we can all use in much the same ways as had gotten accustomed to spending Bitcoins, but with the added benefits of bankers having control over currency in order to prevent hoarding from paying off and speculative bubbles from forming. 2Hooray" we all say, and best of all, we can never lose our 666coins, because our wallets will be stored in small chips implanted into our foreheads.
lmfao.