You get at least one benefit. You can keep your large-scale financial life as private as you like. Not as well as with the newer privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, of course.

And that was arguably a key goal for Bitcoin. It came up in the shadow of ecash and e-gold. Although it's not as decentralized as many expected, it's also far less vulnerable to government takedown than ecash and e-gold were. But sadly, it's no less vulnerable to speculation than any other small currency has been.