More importantly than their intent, exactly how do they expect to enforce this new "policy"? It seems to me to be as enforceable as banning individual to individual cash transactions. Good luck with that.
You can ban/heavily regulate legitimate usages of the currency, which devalues it. If no-one outside of illegitimate circles can accept/process bitcoin money laundering becomes a lot more difficult, since the bitcoin loses value for legitimate purposes.
This is a great idea. The legitimate users will have to find someone to offload their bitcoin to, and since the legitimate outlets are shut down, they'll have to do local, difficult to trace trades. And since the only people buying bitcoin at that point is going to use it for illegal purposes... wait this is a terrible idea
Since companies have to file tax returns, you can effectively ban every one of them from accepting or using these currencies. That means a huge number of uses for the currencies are cut off for the average person on the street. When a currency can't be used to pay your mortgage directly, for example, its value drops.
Oh please, in principle you could easily regulate Bitcoin like Heroin, meaning make it illegal to buy/sell, manufacture (mine) etc... While Bitcoin would not disappear, it would become even less mainstream than now. Hopefully this is not possible under constitutional law!
You mean it would make its price go up, just like with any illegal drug?
Bitcoin's usage would go down, legitimate businesses would disappear. Legislation like this is not likely to happen, but this techno-hubris "Governments can't touch us, because we use smart technologies!" is quite ridiculous.
No, the cost would certainly go up, the price would go to shit because it has no intrinsic value to anyone unlike heroin addicts who need their fix.
I expect they will introduce tighter regulations, i.e. requiring a license to operate an exchange. But all that's going to do is harm legitimate users of virtual currencies...