I disagree. I think he's focusing on the economic fallacies of BTC and comparing them with the economic fallacies of a gold standard, while being dismissive of the libertarian drive behind BTC.

You can dismantle the gold standard with some ECON101 thinking - at least, that is, if you're a Keynes/Smith free market economist. That's what the "bottles full of money" jab was about. Step outside of that framework, though, and the principle behind a gold standard or BTC is a revocation of central bank authority - "Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws" as Mayer Rothschild said.

I'd hypothesize that he's writing to his audience - Krugman readers in the NYT are likely to be middle-of-the-road center-left Democrats with mutual funds and maybe an eTrade account for dallying. To them, BTC is a commodity. After all, you can't do anything with it until you exchange it for dollars, and the central banks have shown reluctance to do that, making BTC much more like light sweet crude than FOREX. BTC arbitrage has a lot more in common with phone phreaking than it does with the bond market. To that end, Krugman's arguments are en pointe.

Clearly, the true believers of BTC see it as an end-run around all other currency in which we stop trading in dollars or euros and do our transactions in a torrent economy. Really, BTC is a pirate currency whose speculative advantages are great enough that it's interested the daytraders. From a Krugman point of view, the "currency" aspects of BTC are much less relevant than the Adam Smith stupidity of the situation.