Matt Phillips at Quartz had an interview with former Fed chair and current hedge fund consultant Ben Bernanke and he used the opportunity to bring up Bitcoin. His response was positive on the technological front, but he had some arguments against it on economic theory grounds. His full response was:

"It’s interesting from a technological point of view. We’re in a world where the payments system is evolving quickly and new approaches to managing payments are proliferating, and some of the ideas around bitcoin will no doubt be useful in doing that. But I think bitcoin itself has some serious problems. The first is that it hasn’t shown to be a stable source of value. Its price has been highly volatile and it hasn’t yet established itself as a widely accepted transactions medium.

​But the real serious problem that it has is it’s anonymity, which is a feature, and is also a bug, in that it has become in some cases a vehicle for illicit transactions, drug selling or terrorist financing or whatever. And you know, governments are not happy to let that activity happen, so I suspect that there will be oversight of transactions done in bitcoin or similar currencies and that will reduce the appeal."

Despite the UK government recently classifying the risk of bitcoin use in terror financing is "low" (pdf) compared to legacy, a document acquired by Reuters is showing that important Brussels politicians are going to be planning to crack down on Bitcoin in the EU under the guise of fighting terror financing. From Reuters:

"They will urge the European Commission, the EU executive arm, to propose measures to "strengthen controls of non-banking payment methods such as electronic/anonymous payments and virtual currencies and transfers of gold, precious metals, by pre-paid cards," draft conclusions of the meeting said."