Yeah, I know. That was the part that stood out the most for me -- the electronic funds transfer network he's using cannot possibly be offering the privacy that Bitcoin does, as long as his name his tied to it and a central arbiter sees all the transactions.
Not claiming that critique was flawless, just that it's (for the most part) intelligent and based on familiarity with the system.
I think what he's getting at with the privacy comparison is that with conventional online money transfer, your bank knows about your transaction history, but nobody else does (unless the bank is hacked or threatened, I suppose).
With bitcoin, although it's anonymised, everyone can see the complete historical record of all transactions. Although you can make a new address for each transaction, there'll be a lot of timing information leaking out there - eg, if fifteen addresses send a total of 100 bitcoins to a new address in the space of a second, and then...
Annie Lowrey discusses Bitcoin in Slate. No clear thesis, but important that it gets attention there. She gives a general overview, with emphasis on its benefits to fringe elements on society, and gives quick attack at the end. The attack seems misinformed, but it links to something more interesting, specifically...
A technical critique by Victor Grishchenko, PhD, who was mentioned here in the context of causal trees. He describes a few problems he sees with Bitcoin:
1) Asymmetry favors attackers, in that it takes a lot more effort to check for double spending than to attempt a double-spend, eventually requiring "supernodes" that have disproportionate influence over the network.
2) It needs to continuously spend spend cycles to stay free from attackers. He then describes an attack I don't quite understand that involves holding on to a discovered block and then broadcasting it at just the right time
3) It doesn't compare well against existing systems in terms of privacy, speed, or transaction cost. (I found this questionable because the system he's comparing it to is still subject to warrants, and Bitcoin takes significantly less time -- 1 hour or so -- to ensure a transaction than the wiring transfers Grishchenko discribes.)
Finally, he credits Bitcoin in being advantageous similarly to Bittorrent: the latter was clumsy and complicated compared to regular downloading, but could perform well enough in a niche niche to force change in the broader markets.