A well written piece, Gavin.
And the road ahead is likely to be bumpy; there will be technical issues that need fixing, there will be legal questions, there will be price bubbles, and there will be scams.
There will also be growing resistance as bitcoin takes hold. Just looking at
the recent Annie Lowrey piece in
State Slate Magazine shows which way the wind might blow out of Babylon should this beautiful experiment begin to thrive. The condescending, minimizing tone of the article actually gives me hope in the viability of bitcoin. I recall the same tone being leveled at http when the web first began to take hold. People with an emotional attachment to centralized authority become personally threatened when elegant methods of routing around that authority are freely given away.