Not everyone interested in Bitcoin are libertarian gold-hoarders :)

Some of us are interested in it because Bitcoin represents an experiment into a distributed network for ownership, in the same way that the Internet is a distributed network for data.

Ultimately, the economics of Bitcoin don't hugely matter in the long term, because crypto-currencies can be programmatically traded between different blockchains using distributed contracts. The hard part is getting an interface up between "normal" currency and crypto-currencies.

There are already some crypto-currencies out there that experiment with different economies and setups. Dogecoin (yes, that Doge) has a fixed inflation rate, for instance, while Peercoin uses a proof-of-stake/proof-of-work mixup that gets around Bitcoin's large use of computing power.