re: Is bitcoin gaining legitimacy?

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The last 6-7 paragraphs say anything about social fairness? Start at "Meanwhile" till the end.

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Why should I only take the last 6-7 paragraphs into consideration? She makes a strong social justice argument at the beginning of the article:

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Though this is not its worst crime. The greater flaw is that the Bitcoin system concentrates wealth in the hands of a group of early adopters, and support industries, which end up forming a new elite. It’s a libertarian-minded reward doctrine, but it’s a highly warped one because the incentives which are put in place reward economic agents for unproductive and socially costly behaviours. Talk about a misallocation of capital in a world where there are still genuine needs and more worthwhile risks to take. If there are social benefits they lie only in the jobs which are created for a small section of society, the innovation sparked by an incentive to produce faster and more efficient task-specific computers and the evolution of the payments infrastructure (innovations wherein can be replicated and adopted by other currency regimes). The most compelling social benefit is probably that the scheme encourages people to learn about programming, cryptography and computers and develop skills for a digital age. But none of these benefits currently outweigh the socially destructive aspects of Bitcoin — the most destructive of which is the fact that the system transfers wealth to a small technological elite who had the foresight to invest in infrastructure which can now extract rents from the system (even after supply is no longer growing) in the form of transaction fees. Late comers, however, will never have the means to compete or accumulate anything but a fraction of the wealth of the early adopters. Most importantly, the system fails to protect the economy from the hoarding problem or supply crunches. This is true even if Bitcoins begin to trade as fragments, because the means to fragment the unit does little to distribute wealth from the early stakeholders to the fractional players.

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As far as the stuff after "Meanwhile"...

She assumes that fractional lending will continue. The interesting thing about bitcoin is that while fractional lending is possible, it will also be possible to keep very close tabs on lenders to make sure that they have an acceptable amount of reserves, which should prevent misbehavior by lenders.