...
You'd think a government would announce something like that. And any change in the law would require an act of congress or the supreme court...I doubt Uncle Sam is ever going to be happy about Bitcoin unless they can control it. Will we see a fork for UncleSamCoins? I doubt that too. Is Uncle Sam gonna allow banks to hold Bitcoin as currency for meeting reserve requirements? I doubt it.
But now I really am curious...
... I assume it'd just be "Bitcoins are seen as X" and from then on Bitcoins would have the existing laws of X
It would be great
I'm not sure that recognizing bitcoins as X is such a great idea. One of the strong points of Bitcoin is that bitcoins themselves don't actually exist! All that does exist is a transaction record (cryptographically signed message) that says address A now owns Y bitcoins, but it doesn't say what they are or where they are stored.
That's why it was deemed hard to put Bitcoin into any existing legal framework and thus put pressure on it.
It would be interesting to see how bitcoins are defined from legal point of view.