Another huge difference is that anybody can become a new agent in Bitcoin. You just buy the hardware. You cannot influence or join eBay in the same way.
I wonder which group might be in possession of the right idea, the group saying "you don't have to use it if you don't like it" or the group that is already forcing the new currency to be under the same democratic rules of the old, "democratic" currency.
Statism, ideas so good we have to force them on people.
With respect to fairness, what's important is the characteristics of the framework within which the resource is used, that enable rent-seeking. With Bitcoin, each individual is their own bank. They control their own private key, meaning access to money is not intermediated by rent-seeking third parties with their lock-ins and closed networks.
Mining is ultra-competitive, because there are no barriers to market entry to the open mining network, ensuring transaction fees are driven down to the maximum extent possible. The algorithmic money supply ensures that no powerful organization and its host of satellite institutions can inflate the currency on a perpetual basis, to slowly the tax the people over generations.
Any way you look at it, Bitcoin is a force for distributing power and control, by eliminating the roles of rent-seekers.
Actually, the article doesn't set out "to prove cryptos won't be huge," and ends on a crypto-positive note:
> Bitcoin has shown us the promise of blockchain technologies despite its design shortcomings.
> The future of the technology will probably evolve towards a model that more resembles real world needs, rather than the needs of “cyberpunks”.
To diverge from the article a bit and respond to your final point, I don't know that the mantra of individual empowerment in the Bitcoin world amounts to anything other than solipsism. Bitcoin, as far as I can tell, ignores structural biases preventing people from accessing the cryptocurrency. We can see evidence of this in the "Bitcoin in Africa" startups, which on the surface seem benign and even benevolent, but are hiding an uninterrogated colonialism: their chief assumption, it seems to me, is that the developed world will always control more of Bitcoin's limited resources, and the value of spreading a small portion of those resources to the developing world comes from lock-in. It's a classic unfair trade agreement, and it doesn't take much thought to see how problematic this situation can become.
eBay can bend you over with fees because they control the market; Bitcoin's limited resources are susceptible to the same kind of market control. That's the discussion I wish more people were having.