The article is based around bundling together a lot of small points and backing it up with shaky analogies to economic theory(e.g. an undergraduate course would

The article is based around bundling together a lot of small points and backing it up with shaky analogies to economic theory(e.g. an undergraduate course would probably focus on utility instead of rent). It's framed in a way that I would consider more persuasive than academic. It has a general point, in that the ultimate direction of cryptocurrency systems is towards energy efficient systems of value and transaction, but this goal tends to lead towards a spectrum of trusted/delegated behavior where proof is not a hard requirement. Much of the argument rests on trust costing as much as work, and I don't buy that. It defies what technologies do: let you leverage effort in a particular direction and get a resulting overall productivity benefit.