I have been hearing about bitcoin lately. I am familiar with e-gold, egold is an old payment processor. However, US government took this company down because of possible illegal and fraud transaction surrounding its system. I read that Bitcoin is doing the same mistakes e-gold had done. Probably bitcoin would not last for a long time? What do you think?
First of all, Bitcoin is not a company, it is a distributed technology system, so it is not possible to completely shut it down. What is possible is to create policies and laws that will effectively destroy it for most of the potential users. There are countries that are not banning Bitcoin, just regulating operations with it, just as with any other money; and there are countries that try to ban it. In US, the situation is not clear, there are movements to support Bitcoin as well as against it. Which side will win at the end is currently unknown. All these good and bad news for Bitcoin quickly appear on its subredit - http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/ . And if you look there just now, you will see a link to this wiki article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Bitcoins_by_country . This article does not contain all the information, but major points in each country is mentioned.
The big difference is that bitcoin is decentralized and therefore is just like a currency, whereas e-gold was always a centralized payment processor.