"sneak in"? Bitcoin tools have been in Debian for years before that article was written...

The article makes some good points, but Debian obviously has the right to make their own decisions -- that's what open source is about.

Personally I think many programs would benefit from out-of-distro distribution methods, but those either don't exist or aren't well integrated. That accompanied with the fact that bitcoin developers don't even provide debian packages means that the article (wrt debian) translates to "please don't use bitcoin on debian"...  That's not constructive.