Agree in politics competing with technology.
It is a natural outcome though, as society struggles to sustain institutions, keep the fragile web of trust together, innovate to deliver cool new stuff, and regulate the innovation so we don't kill people or suddenly have nothing to do.
Mustachianism is a good force, because it teaches resilience and self reliance.
Most people are not futurists, in the sense that they are not anticipating the inevitable technology changes and therefor preparing. They react. This includes, surprisingly, most CEOs. I find it frustrating that throughout my career the future has seemed so obvious, but few executives I tried to advise would prepare. Outside of the occasional Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, most will try to put up human barriers (aka politics) to try to maintain stability. People like stability.
So we want a stable fed/traditional banking system because it has served us reasonable well for a few hundred years. Money = trust, so you must have a trusted intermediary to set the coin. We have learned this since money was invented. The threat to the trust comes from fear, fraud, or fundamentals. Fear is a mass psychology issue, fundamentals are true economic factors (like a country printing too much money for its economy to absorb), fraud a technology one.
Bitcoin is just one of many examples of an alternative currency. The notion of a block chain and block chain intermediaries is being considered by many serious financial players. The key issue is not the actual currency (any currency can be exchanged at a rate), it is more about what technology will we use to facilitate fraud free ownership transfers. Fraud is a huge global currency issue and the industry is using various technologies in an attempt to create a fraud free currency world. Most of these rely on encryption and they actually track the history of the money in the money itself. This gives and audit trail and fraud resilience. Issues such as quality printing for cheap have made paper money worrisome. Issues such as computer hacking have made banking systems worrisome.
That said, most are not even thinking about how traceability in money is itself a social issue. The fact that we all now use credit cards as our 'real money' and that means all our purchases are now effectively public information. This has all sorts of implications.
Anyway, back to the main issue. How do we maintain a world of trust and trade in an increasingly information driven world? The craigslist example is an excellent one. It speaks directly to several of my conclusions. First it is a free service. Second it is a better service. Third, it facilitates direct exchange often without the financial intermediaries (in some case money is not part of the trade process). Hence my comments above. Consumers are growing the economy without the traditional economic measurement systems being able to track this commerce. Growth without growth to the stock market. I see this as the threat to index investing in global equities, but also a hope for the future, in that people can have good lives, do important meaningful work, enjoy, and yet live in a world with very low corporate profits and investment returns. It will be hard for politicians to accept this, but our economic measures will not apply very well. The tools of the fed and the banking system will be blunt and difficult to apply with precision.