I could be misreading the tone; but I got the impression that the fairly frequent mention was partly a product of Boingboing’s “Weird and new things happening on the Internet!” news beat (which the…delightfully varied…world of bitcoin, ASIC-miner schedule shenanigans, and so on, definitely is), partly a sci-fi enthusiast interest in ‘technological advances that allow novel constructs to function’ (you don’t have to be some sort of cyber-goldbug who thinks that the federal reserve is manipulating their inflationary International-Money-Cartel Gnomes of Zurich Conspiracy Money to think that a decentralized cryptosystem that succeeds in the, seemingly impossible off-the-cuff, task of preventing double-spending and counterfeiting of things that are just trivially copyable series of bits. It’s a pretty neat trick.), and partly an interest in the potential to ‘dis-intermediate’ or ‘disrupt’ (as the insufferable silicon valley kids like to) the assorted, generally odious, middlemen who are currently delighted to transfer money for a small fee and a long list of terms and conditions. Even if good old USD are fine by you, it’s a lot harder to feel warm and fuzzy(even if you are a fuzzy fungus, as I am) about Mastercard, Visa, Paypal, Western Union, etc.
In something like the Wikileaks-donation-freeze situation, a bunch of private companies with a de-facto stranglehold on retail-level money transfer simply stonewalled (totally legal, entirely voluntary, non-fraudulent) transfers from donors to an organization that the powers that be disapproved of. That’s the sort of situation where you start to get interested in at least talking about alternatives.
The other factor to keep in mind is that ‘bitcoin’, the specific cryptocurrency by that name, has some embedded assumptions that are arguably pretty dubious; but at least some of those are purely a matter of consensus among people running clients. Using very similar math, currencies with other properties can be constructed, and it’s worth talking about what the ideal property-set would look like.
