Such is the case called bitcoins, a cryptocurrency. In two years or so, we will find if my fellow hackers and ciphergeeks and me will find ourselves fools or fricking rich pioneers.
Moreover, we believed that money and free market can be a positive social order. If we do not believe it is so, bitcoins wouldn't have a thriving community, much less an entrepeneural one.
It also raise and illustrate issues about such a voluntary market economy where there is no police and courts to enforce order. For example, we found out that paypal dollars are bad money. They lack the crucial aspect of irreversibility. It even cause a bank run, a rush to bitcoins. We found out that bitcoins doesn't have that negative aspect and can expect bitcoins to hold value. Unpredictable regime like Paypal cause risk-aversion and effort to find much more predictable ability to transfer from one currencies to another.
Bitcoin offer us unique insight of how a new emerging economy might deal with thieves, cheaters, with no guns and no police. Bitcoin show us how a group of political radicals think about problems, and the future at large. It is out of the box, and at time foolish, but sometime brilliance emerge.
All of these things wouldn't be possible without the culmination of technolibertarianism and anarchism. All of these wouldn't be happening if hackerdom didn't emerge as it has.
Where do you get progress in our society in the conventional sphere of democractic government, parliamentary politics, and such? If you believe power and violence are necessary to achieve goals in society, would you have come up with and invent bitcoins?