The gist I got from it is that the US government is aware of bitcoin, has some casual ruleset surrounding it and will not (for now) take action against anyone using it, or if they do, it'll only be the exchanges, not individuals. Looks like Bitcoin is safer than a Cyprian bank.
It would be safer than a Cyprian bank if BTC prices were as stable as the Euros. For all the criticisms it received, the EUR is more stable than most of the currencies it replaced, and it did not see a single crash in prices as bad as BTC has seen several times. So really, you shouldn't worry about the possibility of the government taking 7% of your money if the alternative is a virtual currency that seen losses of more than 75% in a single day.
Except for the fact that we don't yet know the full extent of the Cypriot haircut, but it looks that some will be paying way more than 7%. Closer to 15% for some [1]. They've now extended the "bank holiday" to "Thursday" [2]. And at least BTC is convertible in a crisis without a central authority. If you can't get your money from the bank at all (which is the case with Bank Holidays) then it's not much good to you.
In a systemic financial collapse, between having BTC on my local computer [3] and having numbers on a computer in a failed financial institution, I know which one I'd rather have. You may feel differently, and that's fine.
And it also appears users converting BTC to USD (etc) need to be MSBs. As a (non-MSB) miner, one can use their BTC to buy anything but dollars... What a strange regulatory limbo to be trapped in...
Can drive a big rig through that loophole though, if it's that simple. i.e. convert to Euros and convert that to dollars elsewhere - or buy something of value and then sell it on ebay etc etc.
