I just read it. Most of the piece is an account of your direct experience, so there's little to be said about it.

About the rest, I concur: the White Paper needs to be re-analyzed, and perhaps ditched altogether.

I have always argued that BTC is a complete failure as currency because it simply works too well as money. The features and virtues that make it and undebasable, portable, secure store of value make it useless as a payment system for retail commerce.

For (very) large transfers where safety comes first and a ten minute settlement time (or several hours even) is attractive, and fees will always be relatively tiny vs the amount transferred, it should work. To buy lattes? No freaking way, LN or no LN.

The fact that Satoshi explicitly said he was after a P2P cash system doesn't preclude the fact that he also describe an effort to create a form of hard money. Which are two different things.

People trying to use BTC as a currency are looking for a problem to their solution. In this day and age there simply is no retail payment problem in most of the planet. Even bank transfers are instant and free for most people.

And the problem of the elimination of anonymous payments, i.e., cash, which would be the only possible use case for BTC as cash, is not addressed by it, with its public, transparent ledger. By the way, these other "commerce-ready" cryptos that you mention are doomed to the same fate, as are smart contract cryptos, once fully programmable CBDC's enter the scene.

In that situation, the only use case that will be left will be the facilitation of fully anonymous payments. Which, again, BTC doesn't do by default.

At this point, yes, just let go. Not of BTC, but of using it for something it doesn't do well. Use it as it was designed: hard, undebasable money. You can call it dismissively a "savings account". If you want to reduce it to that, OK. But it is THE best and definitive savings account, in any case. I think that's a lot already, and much more important and necessary than being a currency.