I remember a friend making a similar comment about EVE online: you set people loose in this anarchistic, libertarian blank state, give them a few years, and... turns out they'll band together into gangs with leaders, that develop into communities with formal governance processes; neighbours helping each other out grows into insurance syndicates....
We've already seen people wanting an authority to compensate them when their bitcoins are stolen; bitcoins are meant to behave like cash, but an FDICed bank account is much more useful than cash for most people. That said, as long as the full feed remains open to anyone who has the spare compute power/disk space and wants to connect up to it, there's still a big difference from the existing financial system.
We've already seen people wanting an authority to compensate them when their bitcoins are stolen; bitcoins are meant to behave like cash, but an FDICed bank account is much more useful than cash for most people. That said, as long as the full feed remains open to anyone who has the spare compute power/disk space and wants to connect up to it, there's still a big difference from the existing financial system.