Puppet... till now no one feared the chinese government because of selling shares. btcgarden only closed because of the risks involved with chinese crowdfunding, as far as i know. And friedcat always checked out such potential legal risks to Asicminer. I mean it would be pretty stupid to risk all his income. So if you now start to generally question the legality then why not start at bitcoins? Its still a gray area and governments would have any right to forbid bitcoins. That happened with many regional currencies before often too.
So far i trust friedcat more than your legal advice in a anyway legal gray area.
Of course once colored coins get used, that may change, if these colored coins represent securities, that has the potential to threaten bitcoin
Agreed, if they use the blockchain to represent colored coins/securities, it will give them ammo to go after the entire Bitcoin protocol. Or if Ken creates an alt coin, then the exchange it's hosted on would be targeted.
These solutions are a step ahead right now, but only one step.
How would they go after an idea? Ban the source code? Also at that point no ban will stop it.
If Colored Coin or Mastercoin works then nothing stops either of them except if the protocol fails. Hundreds of trillions of dollars. The derivatives market is 180 trillion in the US alone. The US economy is only 10-12 trillion.
What this means is that Colored Coin and Master Coin are more valuable as a protocol than the entire US economy. Who is going to ban that during a recession?
Also if those protocols do happen then each coin Bitcoin will be worth around a million dollars potentially and it wont take very long to reach that. It might take 5-6 years and the block reward halving built into the protocol will push it up to a around a million dollars a coin.
This is all speculation assuming the protocols do work and most people are unsure if Colored Coin or Mastercoin can work. If you fear regulation and don't take risks you wont have any rewards.
The governments of the world will react how they react to innovation.