As with the 2nd amendment, arguing for the right to bear arms is not in and of itself an argument for their use. In this case, bitcoin represents by which civil disobedience could be practiced. As long as it is maintained as a real alternative (meaning first and foremost it operates outside the constraints of authority) then a reasonable argument can be made that regulators in democracies will compromise in allowing greater user rights in the official alternatives. Napster and bittorrent <i>did</i> change the music industry, in the end.<p>But even without game theoretic arguments involving civil disobedience, Bitcoin is still interesting. It offers cryptographic protections that have never existed before in real fintech applications (e.g. programmable signatures), and radical transparency and configurable trust that can patch the sort of vulnerabilities that led to the 2007 financial crisis.