I disagree with this. True, the price staying pretty stationary and actually dropping a little is weird giving all the merchant adoption recntly it still matters regardless. Merchants are what we need to push bitcoin along as a genuine and useable currency.
That is one possible point of view, opposite to the one presented in the article. It is true that mass adoption is impossible without convenient ways for a user to spend their bitcoins on things they need.
But it is equally important to make the very idea of Bitcoin widely known and accepted: if there are no people who are aware of Bitcoin's existence and want to use it, the abundance of merchants won't help a bit. This is what in large part drives merchant adoption.
I guess the truth, as it often happens, lies somewhere in between: advances in both merchant adoption and public awareness sum up to provide a synergetic effect and move the Bitcoin ecosystem forward as a whole.
