The logic in this post appears to be:<p>1. "Notice how Bitcoin has a minimal-to-nonexistent cryptographic pedigree".<p>2. "Here are many criticisms of the system ranging from 'it is difficult to scale' to 'it is completely meaningless as a currency', many of them from cryptographers who have studied cryptocurrencies for over a decade".<p>3. "Notice how Bitcoin is currently popular".<p>4. "Therefore, Bitcoin is worse-is-better".<p>It helps at this point to understand that "worse-is-better" --- a casual essay by Richard Gabriel --- describes how Unix took over the world not based on merit but on its viral characteristics. By implication, this article suggests that Bitcoin is also poised to take over the world virally.<p>The issue here is that Unix was <i>also a functioning operating system</i>. Nobody criticizes Unix as "completely unworkable"; they just think it's inelegant.<p>Gwen recognizes this, and uses "elegance" as a straw-man argument to bucket Bitcoin critiques into and to make it fit the pattern of "worse-is-better". But the most damning criticisms of Bitcoin --- criticisms he himself cites in this very article --- aren't that it's inelegant.<p>Instead, the most damning critiques of Bitcoin are instead that it almost totally fails to achieve its security objectives, that it exploits a misperception about anonymity to handwave away the fact that for most users it is not anonymous, that it is reliant on centralized infrastructure ("Bitcoin is peer to peer in the sense of the British Peerage System"), and (most importantly) that it is meaningless as a currency: "I have taken $100 and set it on fire; I will sell you a certificate representing the smoke for $101".<p>These aren't elegance critiques. This isn't "worse-is-better"; to make a similar argument fly, you have to come up with "worthless-is-better". Unfortunately, the greater fool theory floats that argument too, at least until Esquire writes the postmortem on Bitcoin and all the fools who lost money to it.