I doubt that blockchain was invented by a fresh out of school computer science graduate. The breadth and depth of technical complexity (even if just the white paper) that blockchain covers requires time and experience to accumulate.
The author seems to expect that the changes created by cryptocurrency should be visible immediately. It is a lack of patience, and lack of understanding that changing deeply rooted systems and behaviors takes time.
People have never managed software where if you lost your "password", your money was gone forever. They never had to keep a 12-24 word recovery phrase. They've never sent money to addresses that look like hash strings. Their money value was never this volatile (in some countries anyway) and never this complicated to use (understanding and waiting for block confirmations, looking up transactions in the blockchain explorer).
That's why Coinbase exists, to obfuscate these complexities, to sell security as a service. The cryptography behind cryptocurrencies allows you to basically be your own bank vault; this is not intuitive to people.
The fundamentals for Satoshi's vision have been laid out, the rest of the implementation details will come in time.
Buy and hold doesn't have any recurring fees. If you look at the opportunity cost between crypto and any other financial security in the market, its an easy decision.
I suspect the investment banks that say they're going to stay away will quickly get FOMO and jump in sooner rather than later.
Crypto is always in the headlines and will constantly occupy the headspace of trader's colleagues and peers, so it's just human nature that they will not be able to resist having a taste.
It's for wholesale drug operations. Usually drugs go at one time, money comes back another time. Only now instead of cash you could just use a crypto, but figuring out how to liquidate enough of it would be difficult.
Why does he need to call you back? Stock market crashes are nothing new. Bitcoins are basically the same thing as stocks in terms of the way they're traded.
No one is saying a price crash isn't possible. But it won't be caused by some liquidity issue, it'll just be people selling off.
I deposit USD to an exchange...then use that USD to place a Bitcoin buy order. Then I sell some Bitcoin another buyer on the exchange, who was only able to make this transaction happen because they too deposited USD or fiat into their account.
I get the money, they get the Bitcoin. Who is getting screwed?
In due time. Commercial transactions will occur first, business to business.
Consumer applications (like Coinbase) will emerge to support the local population who can use it via smartphone and not need to understand public/private key encryption etc.
how would you get a meaningful number of people who have never used the Internet
They use the Internet; they just call it by a different name: Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram...
Why would a person with low wealth invest their life savings into a highly volatile, recently developed instrument, when they can just buy jewelry, gold, etc