In the early days of bitcoin, all moves by the government were generally against the proliferation of said cryptocurrency on all fronts. While it was successful since there aren't that much places where one can spend their bitcoins to, the community who believes in bitcoin's value, together with speculators, traders and institutional investors are seeing it on a different light: as an asset. For now, governments may be thinking that bitcoin is just up to no good, but once the profit potential is there, their regulations would divert towards the way where they can make money off of it e.g. licenses for exchanges, services; personal taxes etc.