>>However, unless censorship resis-tance in an electronic transaction is a requirement (such as for drug deals, ransom payments, money launderers, and those seeking to evade currency control), irreversibility combined with the volatile price means Bitcoin is sig-nificantly inferior to alternatives such as credit cards or PayPal

This is not true, as Elaine Ou explains:

https://elaineou.com/2016/08/01/the-value-of-settlement-fina...

Any high charge-back industry would benefit from an irreversible payment method, which is why several offer steep discounts if one uses cryptocurrency.

With respect to volatility, that's largely a function of very thin trading volumes, and the high proportion of cryptocurrency's current value stems from speculative demand. In a hypothetical mass-adoption scenario, trading volumes will be huge, solving the first problem, and growth potential will be significantly less, making speculative value a much smaller component of the cryptocurrency's total value.

So this only applies in the early adoption phase:

>>This also means that unless the buyer is a believer in Bitcoin, the buyer ought to buy Bitcoin only immediately before they initiate the transaction, to avoid volatility (and will have had to mine or buy the Bitcoin in any case).

In a mass adoption scenario, immediately converting to fiat currencies through exchanges will not be necessary.

>>Bugs in these smart contracts can be catastrophic.

This is indeed a major risk, but one that can be mitigated through methods like formally verifiable smart contracts.

>>The exchanges themselves also cre-ate systemic risks. Almost all exchang-es seek to avoid regulation, which means they implode with almost seeming regularity—usually due to a combination of theft and fraud.

Absolutely false. The failure rate of exchanges has dramatically declined over the last several years. Methods like cold wallet storage have significantly reduced the losses suffered when an exchange is hacked, and the exchanges are now much more professionally run services than they were in 2012/2013.

I question the impartiality of the author when he makes a claim like this.

>>In many cases the bandwidth limit for crime is not the crime itself, but the money laundering.

I am dubious about this claim. Is there any case of a criminal activity being easy to get away with, but not widely committed, due to the difficulty of laundering the proceeds?

>>It is primarily criminals who regularly benefit from censorship-resistant payments

While it is true that criminals benefit the most from censorship-resistant payments, this is no different than criminals benefiting the most from privacy. It is not an argument against censorship resistance or privacy. The flip side is that exercising one's basic rights, and ensuring one's own survival by doing something as fundamental as trading a good/service for money, requires becoming a criminal in some countries, like Venezuela.

Circumventing Orwellian levels of mass-surveillance and centralized control in places like Xinjiang is also an antitode to a much more dangerous risk to society than that posed by malevolent non-state actors: https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/26/china-big-data-fuels-cra...