PayPal Assault On File-Sharing Sites Makes Business Case For Bitcoin

To be clear, you're predicting legislation that actually passes, rather than just being thrown around? Suppose that calls to outlaw bitcoin come in the next 24 months, but then it doesn't get put into a bill, or it gets put into one or more bills that don't get passed - how long would it be before you'd say this prediction was wrong?

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 suggests total transactions are 1.9M BTC, which would be 27M USD, per day. Wowsers.

People don't seem to understand that it's very easy to kill bitcoin, the same way they killed online gambling in the U.S.: make it illegal to transfer money to bitcoin exchanges or to financial institutions known to violate these regulations. This would kill all the legitimate exchanges and essentially prevent legitimate users from using bitcoin. This solution also has the advantage of being jurisdiction agnostic; the rules would apply only to US banks (or if such laws are issued by the EU, to EU banks) or to other financial institutions operating in the U.S. or with U.S. customers. It's also (relatively) trivial to implement such a blacklist--financial institutions can act on a dime if jail time is at stake.

I think it'll get there however, with larger adoption.

BitMe.com lets you deposit cash at any Chase branch for free, and you can take money out via ACH for 25 cents.

All of the ways you suggest are fine for small amounts, but if you are trying to move thousands of dollars into BTC, percentage-based fees matter.