Anyone in the know wanna weigh-in on what this might mean for the future of our little world here on the SR?
Absolutely nothing.
Liberty Reserve was a centralised virtual currency issued by the Liberty Reserve company (not unlike a bank would issue Euros and Dollars). Bitcoin is a de-centralised, Peer to Peer currency 'issued' by solving complex mathematical algorithms using computing power to do so (mining) and it cannot be shut down by any authority.
The entire Bitcoin economy can function on one single Bitcoin due to its divisibility, so even if governments at some point in the future were to buy up all 21,000,000 bitcoins that will ever exist, as long as there is one person that retains possession of a single Bitcoin that refuses to sell, they can split that Bitcoin up (and it will now be worth billions / possibly trillions in a fiat-currency sense due to the government buying up every other Bitcoin) and the Bitcoin economy will continue functioning in milli-bitcoins (mBTC) or micro-bitcoins (μBTC).
From the Bitcoin Wiki:
One Bitcoin is divisible down to eight decimal places. There are really 2,099,999,997,690,000 (just over 2 quadrillion) maximum possible atomic units in the bitcoin design.
The value of "1 BTC" represents 100,000,000 of these. In other words, each is divisible by up to 10^8.
As the value of the unit of 1 BTC grows too large to be useful for day to day transactions, people can start dealing in smaller units, such as milli-bitcoins (mBTC) or micro-bitcoins (μBTC).
So again, nothing to worry about at all!
Libertas