... the number of total investors has increased exponentially. ...
i am very interested to know how did you measure this?
i mean there is no way of knowing how many people have invested in bitcoin because there is no centralized entity that can release statistics about this so we can make a conclusion and the stats we get from blockchain as the public ledger are inconclusive.
... i believe the real gov. response to virtual currencies is yet to come.
the response will come slowly and as the currency grows in popularity the rules around it will too.