As a means to 'store wealth' - not really. There are 100 other things that make more sense than bitcoin.
As a 'medium of exchange' - it will never be a common currency so it has no real value there. (A shopkeeper cannot price his 5% margin Milk in Bitcoins as the price fluctuates too much vis-a-vis the dollar, which he must also price his milk in).
The only real advantage of Bitcoin is total privacy, which 99.9% have no problem with, only people doing illegal things generally need this.
The small benefit of the fact you can bypass credit card charges etc. is entirely offset by the lack of de-facto security in Bitcoin - although it is 'technically secure' - for the laymen, using it and securely storing 'bitcoins' is not straightforward. That major Bitcoin repos have been hacked is evidence of that.
The banks are into 'block chain' because they saw how quickly Bitcoin spread - and they can't afford to not be part of a wave if it happens, but it won't.
It's funny that so many of bitcoins backers have absolutely no understanding of finance, currency, monetary policy etc..
It's also funny how ideological people are about bitcoin:
" I thought that Bitcoin was similar in many ways to the Internet. The metaphor that I used was that Bitcoin was like email - the first killer app - and that the Bitcoin Blockchain was like The Internet - the infrastructure that was deployed to support it but that could be used for so many other things. I suggested that The Blockchain was to finance"
This is not particularly rational.
What we need are strong, well backed, resilient and responsibly managed currencies.
The only real systematic problem with today's currencies are:
A) the oligcarchy of payment systems like visa grafting 1%-ish off the top and
B) monetary policy decisions that ultimately favour the banks.
It would be nice to get rid of A, but with bitcoin there is no 'monetary policy' and that's a much worse position than having central banks with the ability to do some degree of intervention, even if it's not perfect.
The article is a good example of this - everyone talks about technology, but don't bother to even mention finance, likely because they don't have a clue.
Fintech of the blockchain sort is in a 'bubble' because bitcoin does not solve any 'problem' for 99% of people.
Even in 3rd world countries with scam currencies, the solution will migrate towards simply using the currency of the nearest nation with a credible currency, namely dollars, Euros, and possibly in the future, RMB.