You can at least store a part of your money in BTC, so you don't have the cash lying around somewhere unsafe.

You're solving the wrong problem.

The combination of checking account, debit card, and local bank branch helps businesses:

- take care of the cash that accumulates on premises.

- take care of routine bills.

- purchase goods by distance sales

The article discusses the loss of these benefits. Bitcoin won't solve them until it's more widely accepted.

Sure, you can convert your cash to other stores of value (bitcoin, gold deposits, and so on) and that may be better than keeping cash on premises. But, again, I think most business owners have better things to do with their time than deal with these kinds of transactions, and they don't like the exchange rate risks.

Honest question. Where would you go if you regularly wanted to buy say $5000-10000 worth of bitcoins using cash?

(or for that matter wanted to quickly convert $5000 worth of bitcoins into cash)

LocalBitcoins and non-US-based bitcoin exchanges (funding via e.g. Western Union) for the cash-in.

The problem remains the cash-out, but for smaller quantities one can use Localbitcoins again.

The buy sell spread on LocalBitcoins seems to be in the region of $150-200/bitcoin for cash deals. That doesn't seem too attractive for using bitcoin as an alternative to a checking account.