You cannot possibly call this 'wrong' based on how things went in the past. The current bitcoin economy is shaping up naturally, it's the way people are making money from bitcoin. This post just seems like the author is trying to put bitcoin in a little box and then gets confused when it doesn't behave the way he thinks it should.
>The way this economy should have shaped up is this: Where it is difficult to put a dollar value, transactions should happen in Bitcoins. Like in the early barter days.
Is that how it works for new currencies, though? I mean, the barter days are gone and done, and in the modern world, if it exists and is desired, people will agree on a dollar value. I find it hard to believe that any new currency could arise without the market immediately assigning it a dollar value.
It sounds like the author is trying to compare BitCoin's initial progress with the initial progress of currency itself, which would be very silly.
The flaw in your thought process, I think, is this: "in the modern world, if it exists and is desired, people will agree on a dollar value" - applies only to currencies where 'Trust' is a given. Or, it should be a limited domain (e.g. gaming currencies).
Using Bitcoin is like paying for goods with shares of company stock... stock that can be broken down into almost arbitrarily small subunits... and which are immune to SEC regulation.
There's nothing wrong with the bitcoin economy - it's just very different than anything that's ever existed before. If it were just like fiat money, there'd be little use for it and no economy to speak of.
I see this behavior as a validation of Bitcoin in particular and alternative currencies in general. People horde the currency they feel is worth the most. The dollar is being inflated significantly by the Federal Reserve. The "horders" of Bitcoins are actually investors who believe it will rise relative to fiat currencies.
The problem with these middlemen is that they do absolutely nothing to increase the legitimacy of bitcoin, and in fact undermine it a bit by shining a light on the fact that you can't really buy much with bitcoins. When you pay $10 USD for a good but convert it to bitcoins at the last second, you aren't buying things with bitcoins, you're buying things with dollars and using the instantaneous price of bitcoins for a marker.
TL;DR: The guy describes how economy should work from his point of view, then says how it actually works and makes a statement that "something is wrong with the economy" instead of revisiting his own ideals.
My opinion is this: Bitcoin enables exchange of things outside any particular monopoly of law and violence. Chinese guy can buy something from Brazilian guy for bitcoins without asking permission from anyone. Is it bad or is it good? For these two guys everything is okay - they get what they want. Everyone else? Does not really matter because they cannot do anything about it. Even if it is awful and immoral from your point of view, it does not give you power to interfere: these guys are somewhere on the internet, you cannot easily come and stop them. Whether you like it or not, Bitcoin payments approximate mythical "free market" as close as possible. You can reason about trade on this market in purely economical terms without mixing it with politics (because your political opinion is very hard to enforce). So you either focus on what other people genuinely want, or you expose your egoism by pointlessly telling everyone what's your opinion about someone else's transaction.
