We're not getting a lot of economists writing on Bitcoin.

What's the track record of economists vs. computer scientists over the past ten years (or twenty, or fifty)? You don't have liberal sorting algorithms and conservative ones, but you do have liberal and conservative economic theories. This indicates that economics, especially macroeconomics, is more like opinion journalism than science. We need empirical tests. Bitcoin provides one.

Postscript:

Computer science has delivered the goods in a way that economics just hasn't, as even Krugman admits[1]:

  ...the widely accepted proposition that events like those 
  of the 1930s could never happen again. But even pessimists 
  like me, even those who realized that the age of bank runs 
  and liquidity traps was not yet over, failed to realize how 
  bad a crisis was waiting to happen... 

  What you can criticize economists for – and indeed, what I 
  sometimes berate myself for – is failing even to see that 
  something like this crisis was a fairly likely event.

Why weren't they able to see this was a likely event? Well, rewind a bit and witness Bernanke writing in 2004 about the "Great Moderation" [2], the ostensible "decline in macroeconomic volatility":

  My view is that improvements in monetary policy, though 
  certainly not the only factor, have probably been an 
  important source of the Great Moderation. In particular, I 
  am not convinced that the decline in macroeconomic 
  volatility of the past two decades was primarily the result 
  of good luck, as some have argued, though I am sure good 
  luck had its part to play as well.

In other words, Bernanke thought the (nonexistent) Great Moderation was the result of improvements in monetary policy. Thereby approving of the monetary policy that inflated the housing bubble, while blithely unaware of the catastrophe that was to unfold. Conclusion: economists aren't so good at predicting economic events or structuring economic systems. Ben thought the system he'd helped build wouldn't fall down. It did. Time for some new ideas, from people who actually do build systems that don't fall down: computer scientists.

[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/economics-in-the...

[2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200402...