[ori_b]

I'm not a bitcoin expert, so I may end up off base, but...

The US government seemed surprisingly warm to bitcoin in the senate hearing. I suspect that if governments end up getting involved in bitcoin, each merchant will require some form of ID for each wallet that they interact with. This will mean that tracking down crimes like this will be fairly easy, since there's a record of each transaction. Trace down the chain, find the people involved, and if an anonymous wallet shows up, you investigate the people that it transferred to or from.

Sure, it erodes privacy, but bitcoin has the potential to make things much easier for law enforcement (and anyone else interested in money transfers) by causing registration of endpoints, giving very strong leads to investigators.

[dmix]

ID'ing hasn't stopped stolen guns from being used by criminals, I highly doubt it will stop hackers from being able to use Bitcoin. Harder maybe. But there will be thousands of markets that exist outside of USA regulation (or black markets within the USA). Especially by the time the USA would be capable of implementing some sort of ID system.

There is also factoring in the complexity added to associating any form of ID to a particular coin, if CoinJoin or similar trustless anonymizing mixing services reach widespread adoption.

This is all assuming Bitcoin continues it's mainstream course.

[GigabyteCoin]

If the US government decides to take this approach, I am sure that a few of these guys will do the exact opposite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_haven#Examples

[dublinben]

Jurisdictions like that have been increasingly disappearing. If regulators in major countries make it illegal to exchange BTC anonymously, it will significantly hamper its adoption.