The issue with banks only seems to relate to directly setting up a bitcoin business. Using bitpay or another payment preprocessor to accept payments in bitcoin should not present a problem, especially for an established business. The argument of VAT does not apply to accepting bitcoin as payment only trying to sell bitcoin itself, and besides I've not been able to find anywhere that directly states bitcoins or "digital currency" or "crypto currency" should be treated as a single purpose voucher on HMRC's site to justify that anyway. The FOI refusals may simply be because they are been slow and don't actually have anything officially down on paper to release yet.

It's a well written article and I don't doubt that many of those problems exist, but there is a bit difference between operating a business and accepting bitcoins as payment and operating a business to deal in bitcoins.