In Nazi Germany everyone used the Reichsmark except for American POWs there, who used cigarettes. Right now in Argentina they use pesos and dollars. Furthermore the official exchange rate set by the government isn't the true exchange rate that you can get on the street. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner-of-war_camp and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_peso
Even here in the US there are plenty of people willing to trade or barter or accept slightly alternative currencies. I might argue that something's money-ness is related to it's acceptance as a medium of exchange. Probably not linearly, but in some way. There are network effects for money just the same as everything else that humans do.
At home I've got US coins that are labelled as dimes but I can take them to quite a few places and exchange them for at least $1.25 in today's paper dollars. Why? They're pre-1965 dimes and they've got some silver and that makes them worth more.
To try and pin down "money" as "absolutely this one thing always and forever" is a bit of a fool's errand because money is as one friend of mine put it a "shared delusion". It's a decidedly human construct and while you can pass laws, you can't actually control people's behavior. If everyone decides that bitcoin is money it doesn't matter what the law says about dollars, they'll be just as worthless as this author thinks bitcoin is now.
Bitcoin is in a hypermonetization melt-up phase.
No, its not. That's the process of printing money to pay off a debt. Or the act of a government making something legal tender. It might even be a tenable name for something becoming money (which isn't just a marketable commodity.)
Things often become marketable commodities -- even rapidly, especially when they are newly discovered or new uses are discovered for them -- without becoming money.
> Bitcoin is in a hypermonetization melt-up phase.
What is that even supposed to mean?
> (which isn't just _a_ marketable commodity.)
You got that right. It's _the_ marketable commodity.
> What is that even supposed to mean?
A melt-up is the opposite of a melt-down.
"Rapidly becoming a marketable commodity" is vastly different than being "the most marketable commodity".