Genie is out of the bottle so just like the supposed threat to stop printing $100 bills (too entwined in worldwide cross border activity - legal or otherwise) U.S. won't say boo about Bitcoin. If anything Bitcoin etc might be the reason the $100 paper bill will become outdated at some point and taken out of circulation.
I meant the 'wannacry' virus.. so 'just' was the last few weeks . Basically all encryption hacks demand payment mainly in bitcoins, and these last few weeks they were able to get into larger systems... so I was kinda saying that we did have that scenario what you pointed to. I am curious as to when authorities either start regulating or force it into shutdown. The last seems almost impossible, since that needs to be a global effort... I guess when the regular payment systems don't allow deposits anymore it's basically over for alt-coins...
Yeah I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe the government is too busy with other things and will act only when the big black mail happens. China is already limiting bitcoin, Russia would go along with Trump and most likely Europe too. Those are the biggest markets, and again, if half of the world doesn't accept it as currency, then it is just a collector's item but not exchange of value, what the original goal was...
Meanwhile it has been going the other direction. South Korea and Japan have become more accepting of Bitcoin (Genie out of the bottle) and two of the biggest drivers of this historical bull move.