It's not decisions being forced by the Foundation and I'm tired of seeing it put across like that. It's a discussion and it's a really important one. Here is why:
Imagine Bin Laden is still around.
We find out his Bitcoin address. It contains 10,000 Bitcoins and we can see transactions entering it.
We then see outgoings, some of which are traced to weapons used to kill 1000s of Americans, think a major bomb or subway incident.
What do you think is going to happen? Media outrage and congressional outrage. "We must ban this worldwide!". It's exactly what will happen. Bitcoin being so public is a double-edged sword.
Severian, I picked the quote out for you. Take note of the bit in bold. If you don't see that bitcoin needs some kind of plan to counter accusations when this happens, you're wrong.
Bitcoin is so public that we can see criminal money, e.g. Crypto locker. One day this will be mainstream news and but everyone will be lobbying to have a way to take that money.
Does it mean they should be able to? Absolutely not.
Does it mean that as a community we need to be fully prepared for this? Yep. If we don't, you'll get the coin verification stuff foisted on you or worse. The crypto stuff will become underground and kept away from the vast majority of people. That's the worst case scenario as far as I'm concerned, but I accept we may differ on opinion there.