[jasonwatkinspdx]

While I am sympathetic, this is the same sort of argument that was made in the past with napster and the trend of later laws has been to hold "enablers" liable (at least when it comes to copyright). Given what happened with egold I would not have much faith that the US (and western world) legal establishment will tolerate something like bitcoin. But who knows, maybe we'll get a judge who is willing to make fine distinctions from technical arguments, or is more favorable on free speech vs the interests of those who currently control the flow of capital.

Follow up:

egold plead guilty to "operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business". While I'm not familiar enough to say definitively if bitcoin could avoid this same statute in the US, I'd guess not.

[weavejester]

Napster had a centralized search engine. Later P2P networks, like Bittorrent and Gnutella are decentralised, and no-one has yet declared those technologies illegal.

Even more so than Napster, E-Gold was very centralized, and thus an easy target. Bitcoins are an entirely decentralized network like Bittorrent or Gnutella, which have not been declared illegal.