Something just occurred to me: is Bitcoin unnecessarily causing itself grief by being promoted as "money"? Once you get it classified as money, all sorts of political (not to mention emotional) baggage gets attached: the government wants to regulate it and such.
What if you kept everything the same, but promoted it as a "social status codification mechanism" or something like that? That is, make Bitcoin ownership a way of accumulating social status (among some sub-community -- Bitcoiners, if nothing else). The more coins you have relative to others, the higher your rank. Of course, nobody knows how much any person has, just how much each address has. But as long as there's the option to reveal your ownership, you have the potential for status.
If it were promoted this way, and had always been regarded this way, it would be harder for its opponents to conceive of it as competing with national currencies and therefore be harder to justify banning or taxing. After all, you don't have to report "accumulation of social status" as income on any tax form, right? You would be able to "trade" the status to buy things -- but since Bitcoin is, at root, a public database ("money is information"), any such transaction can be equivalently represented as someone gaining and someone losing social recognition.
One could no more justify taxing "status payments" than they could justify taxing "promotion to manager" or "popularity".
Just a thought...
That would also apply to people who would otherwise sell real things for bitcoins.
There seems to be quite a bit of a Bitcoin interest around here, with several articles about it already: [1 2 3 4 5 6 7]
I propose that links and generic Bitcoin comments should be posted here, instead of making a new discussion thread for each interesting article about the subject.