It seems the author of that piece confuses different notions

Which means he doesn't actually understand the difference between a capital gains tax, property tax, and income tax. At first he claims that the IRS "currently considers cryptocurrency to be property" and then he ends up with stating that the IRS "considers virtual currencies to be very much the same as all other forms of currency when it comes to taxation, including fiat monies". It just tells us that he doesn't in fact know how Bitcoin is actually taxed by the IRS. Just in case, I don't know either as I'm not a US citizen or resident but I'm well aware of these taxes and when you should pay them. If you have property like land, real estate, etc you have to declare it every year and pay respective taxes on it for just having it. This is obviously not the case with Bitcoin as you have to declare only the profits earned with it, so what you should pay is more like a capital gains tax. But you don't pay a capital gains tax on your money, only an income tax when you receive this money, for example, from your employer as pay