They said in the Reddit post that further down the road they want to implement something like Google wallet or apple pay, that would allow for credit card aliases. I think the Bitcoin solution is the one they chose to build a new platform/foundation but without all the regulation and partnerships hassle of making it for traditional payment systems.
Imo after reading it, it doesn't seem that crazy or off-brand anymore (so long as it gets fleshed out to use something not as transactionally-inefficient as bitcoin).
Edit: their related bitcoin guide has made me change my mind somewhat and think it's a little crazy. I was viewing this as a stepping stone (almost a functional tech demo) towards something more reasonable, but now it doesn't look like that's necessarily what they had in mind @_@