I’m not angry at bitcoin or at you. I’m frustrated seeing intelligent people throw themselves at something that appears to be a pyramid scheme built on an ancap view of the world where we should all just rely on ourselves and the magic of the blockchain to save us all from the tyrany of... everything, I guess? And everyone who knows about it now will be rich! Bolstered by a lack of understanding of how finance works, they go out there and shill systems that are actively user hostile and rife with manipulation. Scammers on every doorstep and transactions are always final. A vote for Bitcoin is a vote for the scammers, the manipulators, the shady exchanges. The uncensorable, decentralized (excluding China of course) deregulated payment network functioning as designed. It’s a beautiful theory that just doesn’t fit the real world.
1. I spend a lot of time learning and reading about Bitcoin and the blockchain -- that's why I don't like it. The technology is fine, it's just a database with hashes. Proof of work dates back to 1997 (22 years ago) with HashCash. Bitcoin is over a decade old. In all that time, nobody has found a good use for blockchain -- at least one that isn't better solved otherwise. Think of what else has happened in 10 years to technology that adds actual value. Remember the iPhone 1 (2007)?
I didn't have to get half way through the abstract to find the problem, and it's the same exact one I pointed out. You still need an on-chain transaction to open a channel ("Instead of one blockchain transaction per channel, each user only needs one transaction to enter a group of nodes") or in this case join a group. Each person needs to do this. There are 7,000,000,000 of us and if we dedicated the entire blockchain (7tx/sec) to opening channels that would take 34 years just to open a channel (or here, join a group) for everyone on earth. The paper you linked references a paper explaining it for you, as #9 in the references [1].
The paper cites being able to reduce on-chain transactions 96% for a group of 20 people with 100 channels between them -- I'm saying we can't even get to 1 person with 1 channel to 1 other person.
2. Big difference between paying your taxes with bitcoin and paying taxes denominated in bitcoin. If you received 1BTC ($19,000) renumeration for your services January 2018 then went to pay your taxes "with Bitcoin" in Ohio April 2019, expect to pay approximately 2BTC ($7600 / 40%) in taxes. That's a 200% tax rate. If you could pay your taxes denominated in Bitcoin you'd be paying 0.4BTC ($1300) -- or 40% of unit of account, 6.8% of value. Make no mistake you're paying in US dollars, they're just providing a convenient forum for exchange. I'd image they'd do the same with a goat exchange if people decided to be equally backwards and everyone wanted to start using goats as payment.
3. Anecdotes aren't really worth much. It's just as irrelevant as my telling you 100% of the places I frequent don't take bitcoin. I don't hold that up though, I look for studies.
4. Re: LocalBitcoins and the bolivars, if they were traded with foreigners, they'd be unequivocally better off with a USD denominated account and a debit card. They'd have saved (up to) 80% of their net worth relative to what they did. But who on earth would take their bolivars? Zero sum.
If they traded it with each other the same amount of net worth was lost because the total number of BTC in Venezuela and the total number of bolivars remained unchanged, all that changed was who had them. No problems were solved by Bitcoin here.
[1] http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o...