Wonderful someone at least trying to refute my points.
Getting hundreds of thousands of ASIC hashers isn't out of their budget at all. And coercion of foreign companies is as easy as preventing them from doing trade in the USA if they wanted to take it that far. Realistically they wouldn't even need to threaten that, they just put the big money bags at the front steps of Global Foundries or Intel and they'll get all the 14 nm ASICs they want developed by hoards of mathematicians who probably have wet dreams over this stuff.
Also, the government wouldn't treat money laundering and tax avoidance en masse the same way as media piracy. One involves completely undermining their ability to exert control over the populace and generate revenue versus Hollywood missing out on few measly billion.
Shutting down a website in Finland is as easy as removing their record from the root DNS servers, which to my understanding reside within the reach of the US government. In addition to that, Finland is a signator to the same treaties governing global money laundering as many other countries. They would be bound to this law, again if the US government really sought to pursue it. I imagine the Finnish government would feel equally threatened by Bitcoins by the time the US federal government is. The US also has military bases and personnel still in Japan. I think they have influence still.
Litecoin is just as effected by this for the same reasons - the US government has more money at it's disposal than the entire capitalization of Litecoin. If it relies on consumer products, the US government has just as equal access to the equipment, and have more money to guarantee access to it. They would just keep playing wack-a-mole until crypto currencies become a serious pain in the ass to any investor completely devaluing it.
If any of this becomes enough of a threat to the status quo of the global banking system, it will get shut down. Keep in mind the pointless and never ending war on drugs still exists, that's why cocaine isn't on store shelves, just as easily bitcoins could be stopped from being accepted at the cash registers. Just wait and see when some terrorist camp gets raided and they find USB keys with bitcoins on them; it doesn't even really need to happen either, they could just fabricate the story.
In the short term, fuck I'd throw all my money behind crypto-currencies. Do I see it surviving past 10 years? Not that likely.