I think the best way to describe Jason Lowery’s misunderstanding is that he doesn’t know the map from the territory. He looked at the map, got really excited about it, and decided it was the territory and then wrote a thesis on this.

Bitcoin is not just merely the “heaviest chain” rule. Bitcoin is an agreement by millions of people that having a common way to exchange value apart from government or corporations is fundamentally useful.

You can’t destroy this with nonces.