In the article the author claims stocks have an "external" pay off because stock is tied to a company that sells products and if the company does well they might pay shareholders dividends or do a stock buyback. I can accept that a dividend is an "external" source of income, but those are not guaranteed in the stock market by any means. Most people buy stock in hopes that the price will rise due to simple supply and demand (a company buyback is just more demand). If that counts as external then Bitcoin should be covered too, especially since the overall supply of Bitcoin is guaranteed not to rise over a set amount. That's not the case with any other investment in the world (except maybe real estate, depending on how you look at it)

Bitcoin miners do collect rewards and fees (but not "gas" because that's an ethereum thing not a Bitcoin thing) and Miners are a key part of the operation of Bitcoin, but they are not "the operators" of Bitcoin in the same sense that Bernie Madoff was the operator of his fund. Anyone who wants to can become a miner, no permission necessary. Miners do not actively direct the activity of Bitcoin, they cannot change the rules (especially about how much revenue they collect), allow or disallow certain people from participating (and stay profitable), or anything like that.

There are other cryptocurrencies (most of them actually) where the developers of the currency act a lot more like Bernie Madoff type operators. They own a vast majority of the tokens and the source code that runs the network and they make executive decisions about operations, supply of tokens, protocol (code) changes, etc. That is why those of us who have been around a while point out that Bitcoin is the only one that is not a scam.