Having some experience in this space, the CFTC is criminally wrong about their assertions that it's "money" (i.e. "currency"). You cannot pay your taxes or any other debt with it. It has no stable backing; which is just as much a weakness as it is a strength.
This article is pretty chilling. "they can be easily purchased in exchange for ordinary currency, act[ ] as a denominator of value, and [are] used to conduct financial transactions." -- one could say that about anything that retains value; in the 90s, there was the Beanie Baby craze, where people were "exchanging" money for ones that "held value".
I disagree that it's "MLM"; a person's success is not correlated to activity from a downstream distribution network. Sure, getting more people to buy into it can raise the value of your own holdings, but that's true for many things, like stock markets.