The political examples you give are valid, but couldn't gold (for example) work as well to fund Wikileaks?
At some point you need to convert any currency to goods or services so to me the real value of a currency like this would be it's stability of value, but it apparently lacks that.
It seems the lack of a "centrally controlled system" is what makes it so vulnerable to wild swings in real value.
I certainly agree it would be great to have a way to spend and send and receive money without paying a 3rd party a fee, but to do that Bitcoin would need a stable valuation.
From where I sit it appears to have been used as a sort of pyramid scheme. I can accept that's not connected to the intent of the concept, but that is no small part of the reality of it now.
Lacking any way to manage the volatility of value it seems it's either never going to work or it's value must be tied to something tangible, like gold in a vault. But it's not. It's apparently tied to whatever an "investor" might be willing to pay.
The only real value I can see in it is the cost of the computing time it took to run the algorithm to create a bitcoin. The leap from that to trading the result of the output for an ounce of gold or bushel of wheat is where I get disconnected.
If I can convince someone my bitcoin has real value and they trade me a bushel of wheat for it, why would the bitcoin have any value to anyone else? I can see where you might avoid paying a tax or a banking fee but you still have nothing more than a digital file.
I can certainly see how hyping "Bitcoin" could create the illusion of value and that could create a rising market for it, but at some point all you really own is a bit of code that has no real value on it's own. No government that will give you their issued currency for it.
No one likes paying taxes but we do like good roads and safe schools, etc. So if the concept is purely to avoid paying taxes we need to figure out how to tax bitcoin transactions to fund those public services.