The most important lesson to learn from the Bitcoin experiment is that 'money == speech' on a fundamental, cryptographic level.

Anonymous speech (i.e. using public keys) enables anonymous trades with other people.

Transactions are signed and can't be forged, just like publishing a blog post signed with your public key.

And a distributed network can be strong, just like bittorrent or Tor.

Regardless of whether the current implementation and economy surrounding Bitcoin succeeds (I think it will), this is without a doubt how our future information-enlightened society will develop