In all seriousness, this is going to come across as a conspiracy theory, but why else would major government organisations be thinking that bitcoin is actually a good thing? Surveillance by design neatly negates all the current NSA privacy issues! It is also a figurative goldmine for economics researchers, who get to study every transaction in an economy for once, with full information on how the funds are following.
There's quite a few of us who have been concerned for a while about the issue of who controls the bitchain, as the only real thing stopping a single entity from doing this is cost. Yet the advantages are so very high. There's also the very real possibility that you don't actually need 51% of miners to do this for specific purposes, either. Just look at some of the TOR monitoring research.
EDIT: I should also add that we need to be talking about these issues, rather than dismissing them. If the cryptocurrency movement is to survive, then these are the challenges ahead.
And one has to ask, if this is not the sole means of accepted currency, are these issues actually a concern? What would count as appropriate mitigation? Can multiple forms of cryptocurrency co-exist and serve different purposes?