1. Yes - in the long term<p>2. Not sure I understand this question. I do think governmental threat is real, but I'm not seeing anything too threatening on the horizon, and it would need to also be on the global scale. But even then, look how much luck they've had with piracy (not much).<p>3. There are two things here. I don't like that it's growing this fast either, since it does make it less useful for spending it, and this may seem counter-intuitive, but at the same time, it's raising a lot of awareness and I think it's making many businesses consider it as a "real currency" - perhaps not right now if it keeps growing at $5 per day or whatever, but when it stabilizes a bit more.<p>The second thing is that it <i>will</i> stabilize eventually, but I wouldn't expect it to be a "permanent stabilization" in the next few years. If this is indeed a bubble, then it will probably drop to who knows how much (probably still $20+ though, at the minimum), stay like that for a few months, or a year, and then start rising again as people start using it, and those companies who've heard of it during its "boom" now want to start using it.<p>I know a lot of people see the rise of Bitcoin's value as "unbelievable" and wonder how could this be. But as with any currency, what matters is if people <i>trust</i> that currency enough to transfer their hard earned dollars into it. It's not that different than people buying Facebook Credits (or some other virtual currency) because they <i>trust</i> Facebook to sell them stuff (whether virtual or real) for those credits.<p>With potentially millions of people wanting to put their "real" money into Bitcoin and trust into it, it's very <i>natural</i> for the value of Bitcoin to grow this much, especially with so few of them around (typical supply and demand forces here).<p>But as I said above, the fact that Bitcoin gets to be worth a lot of dollars, doesn't surprise me, just how <i>fast</i> it's doing it. If Bitcoin was worth $1 million by the end of the year, without any real changes in the ecosystem (like say China adopting it as its national currency, or anything like that), then I <i>would</i> be worried, because it would seem too much like a bubble, without any serious adoption behind it. But being worth $1 million/bitcoin within the next 20, 30, 50 years - then I could see that happening.