1) "blockchain inventor David Chaum"
Chaum developed methods to do blinded ecash, there's nothing "blockchain" about a central database checking blinded signatures for double spends.
D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, and N. Szabo were working on methods of how to distribute property titles and timestamp data to reduce trust requirements of the data through out time.
Chaum's design never solved the problem of how to create bits that people can inherently reason about how much they trust them as money/scarcity. He was ardent about turning fiat currencies into digital tokens -- drastically different than making bits into money.
2) Does it make much sense for Bitcoin's author to be, as the article claims, highly experienced with asymmetric cryptography but also soliciting advice from "real cryptographers" on the cryptography mailing list? Sassaman's archived site doesn't show much cryptography work (but much cypherpunk work)
3) "Len joined Network Associates to help develop the PGP encryption central to Bitcoin"
The curves used in bitcoin's -- and very limited amount of -- cryptography aren't used in PGP.
4) "the remailer technology that was a precursor to Bitcoin."
Much of this article seems to be straining to make connections. Remailers don't have anything to do with Bitcoin. If anything remailers are the precursors to Tor / i2P. Identification of bitcoin nodes in the early version of bitcoin code was as shockingly easy as... joining an IRC channel.