"it appears bitcoin found its own way to get back in the press. By boosting its prices to above $300, which it hasn’t done since mid-July"

What. Bitcoin decided to up its own price? No. Trading volume and demand from the consumer public has skyrocketed in the last couple weeks. The price on the exchanges has gone up over $100. And a lot of people just got rich again. Those who see the value in this technology, and it's impending growth. On the contrary it is nowhere near becoming irrelevant like the author implies. Over $1 billion in trading volume in the last 24 hours alone.

The reality is, the banking system is a ridiculous mess of unnecessary intermediaries, trusted third parties, slow moving funds, and inefficient systems. They could have improved this system over the last 20 years by simply using a shared database system of various sorts. But they just didn't bother because they're taking in trillions of dollars in transaction fees from the consumer public.

Enter Bitcoin. The first frictionless way to transfer money anywhere in the world, virtually for free. Instantly. And now you've got the first competitor to international banking in the last several decades.

So what are they doing? They're trying to stay relevant. Ultimately they are going to find that using a block chain system is an incredibly inefficient way to address their weaknesses. Because they're cherry picking the features of the bitcoin block chain that seem safe and likable to them, and dumping the rest. They love the shared database element (which can be done cheaper and more efficiently without a block chain).

But all of its other elements, including eliminating the need for trusted 3rd parties, incentivized mining, securing the database properly, decentralization, the first money supply they can't be manipulated, and a worldwide public ledger for full transparency in economic transactions? They're cutting all that out. Because it's scary to them. After all: they are banks.

So they're making their own version with features they need: The ability to control the numbers, add unnecessary fees, speed up their own internal systems, keep their activities private from regulators snooping eyes, etc. They are basically taking a decentralized technology whose only purpose is to eliminate single points of failure and trusted parties, and re-introducing centralization and the need for trust. Extracting 30% of Bitcoins identity and leaving the most important 70% behind.

Any change will improve upon their current systems. Because their current systems are that bad. And any change is going to save them money. So it will be viewed as a victory. But they could've just as easily created a distributed database system for significantly cheaper, saving the consumer public trillions of dollars in unnecessary fees, decades ago. You don't need, and you actually probably shouldn't use Satoshi Nakamoto or his meddling block chain to accomplish this. What they are building now is going to be the most inefficient version of Bitcoin technology to possibly exist. But when you put lipstick on a pig, some people will still think it's kissable.