Good text, but let me discuss the long run...
For all of our critiques of the existing system, we socialists propose our own states, complete with currencies. Would a decentralised currency like Bitcoin pose as much of a threat to socialist economies as it could to todays central-bank-mediated capitalism?
What about the next step? If we are capable of having a decentralized currency, shouldn't we thrive for a center-less economy? I don't think socialist governments (social-democratic or communist) and bitcoins can go well together in the long run. The pseudoanonimity of the system may be very bad for taxes once people - the new generation - start to learn how to become anonymous. Unless the government have NSA-tons of computer power, following the steps of every transaction to bust tax evasions would be impossible. And I don't want my government to have NSA-tons of computer power.
Without this taxes, how can any state socialism provide health care and education for its citizens? It can't.
But the citizens, organized locally, can. Centralized states, left or right, is what sustain boss power*. Free from that, people can take control of their local economies and create their own schools and health care systems (and regulation agencies, and planned their own economies, etc, etc, etc).
I'm not saying that cryptocurrency will
cause socialism. I'm saying that cryptocurrency will
change socialism.
*I know this is polemic. But this is not fringe socialist forum, so I'm not going to explain why a think that. I basically defend that without bail-outs, the police, war, IP and etc. economy would naturally become more horizontal.
Marx, Lenin or Trotsky could not have conceived of a decentralised currency mediated via the Internet, or of the Internet itself; but like many other things that have arisen out of the worlds increased connectedness, Bitcoin could be a powerful tool towards realising their ideas.
Maybe we should care less about Marx, Lenin or Trotsky and more about Proudhom, Bakunin and Tucker. The socialist paradigm should change back to its anti-government/worker-control-of-the-means-of-production roots.