The fundadmental problem i have with articles that seem to critically analyse bitcoin is the completeness. This article touches upon several factors but perhaps due to the word limit treats a few things superficially.

A good example here is its mention of the fundamental technology building blocks of bitcoin. These have been around for years. In fact when I first heard of bitcoin and got a fairly understandable grip on the large technology pieces involved, my reaction was - darn its just like how I first envisaged hotmail/twitter/whatsapp but did nothing about it. The point is the core technology could manifest itself into different applications. Bitcoin is just one such manifestation. Just a few days back we have seen the release of Ethereum - a platform to create a global, fail safe, distributed, smart contacts the likes of which the world has never seen before in terms of the scale of replication and distributedness. This is a new paradigm in distributed computing that opens up a whole new era of possiblities especially when intersected with other technology developoments such as IoT(Internet of Things) or MPC (Multi Party Computing). And I am not even talking about blockchain and its usefulness.

So sure bitcoin as money or legal tender may fail, it probably may survive as a mechanism to transport value over the internet, but it is contradicting reality if we say that it will fail as a technology. Its just a matter of time before we see successful manifestations of the fundamental computing paradigms involved in cryptocurrency.