Bitcoin is useless to the vast majority of people as a cash substitute. If you want people to use your decentralized currency it needs to be an actual currency, which means 1. easy to transfer and 2. predictable store of value. Without monetary policy bitcoin will never accomplish 2. They're a very long way off from 1 too.

> Without monetary policy

You are the enemy.

A few months ago, it cost $4 in BTC transaction fees alone to buy a $2 bottle of soda. Last spring, it cost $60 in transaction fees to buy a $2 bottle of soda.

You did not mention the Lightning Network, where fees are negligible. You cannot seriously research on bitcoin without coming across the Lightning Network.

Off-chain solutions to the inherent inefficiencies of blockchain applications also sidestep the advantages that cryptocurrency proponents promise blockchains will bring.

Not really. Lightning is build on top of Bitcoin, every Lightning payment is a real Bitcoin transaction that can be settled to the network if necessary. It has all of the benefits of Bitcoin, plus higher throughput, enhanced privacy, lower fees, and faster settlement.

How? Is permissionlessness and decentralization inherently harmed by using the Lightning Network?

That is no longer true. I recently topped my sim card for $3, then $1 with Bitcoin, while on vacation in Egypt. Either transaction cost me something like $0.001.

Conveniently ignoring lightning payments.

There was a burrito shop on my block that had a bitcoin pay terminal (well, they had a bitcoin atm like device to get cash at)... they've gone out of business and I haven't seen another one since - some POS terminals have bitcoin support I've heard, but I haven't seen one yet... Until I can buy a coffee with bitcoin at Tim's bitcoin is not a serious competitor to oppose the cashless society.

What makes Bitcoin any more resilient in this scenario?

Govt mandates businesses carry insurance, insurance company releases list of Bitcoin wallets that their patrons are forbidden to have interacted with. Done.

> Govt mandates businesses carry insurance

Insurance against what risk? The risk of receiving money that was once owned by a criminal? If the government is going to make that illegal, then you can just list that as your concern, without introducing the extra complexity of insurance companies.

So does bitcoin work without the internet? Otherwise, does everyone have internet and the devices to access it? How is bitcoin any better than other digital payments/assets?

Without any internet at all, or without the payment device having constant internet access? Because you can transmit a bitcoin transaction over NFC, Bluetooth, QR codes, etc to the receiver, who can then broadcast it at their leisure.

Yeah with no internet at all, Bitcoin along with all modern financial infrastructure breaks down.

Any dreams of Bitcoin replacing cash died years ago.

More specifically the dream of bitcoin replacing cash died in 2017 when changes were made to the protocol. Bitcoin became cost prohibitive to use for small transactions (less than several hundred dollars) and the addition of a feature called 'replace by fee' meant that small transactions weren't immediately reasonably trustworthy and you would have to wait for one or more confirmations on the blockchain.

Bitcoin is hardly cost prohibitive. When was the last time you sent a transaction? The last one I sent cleared at 2sats/byte and was <$1. Are you going to buy your coffee with it? No, probably not, but that hardly makes it a useless as currency replacement. Replace-by-fee doesn't make small transactions any less trustworthy either, since you should never trust any unconfirmed transaction (by definition, if its not on the blockchain its not yet a transaction). Furthermore, the lightning network blows away the competition in terms of cost per transaction, and while not perfectly trust-less (unlike the base layer) it has far less custodial risk than a bank or credit card account. If for example your counter-party goes rogue, at worst you just close the channel resulting in a rollback to the last settled balance state, minus an on-chain fee.

Don't you think the custodial nature of lighting network opens it up to the same type of censorship we're seeing with bank transactions in Canada? What's stopping governments from blacklisting wallets and pressuring LN nodes from transacting with them?

Good luck shutting down or controlling thousands of nodes on the Tor network.

Don't see how any government could reasonably pressure enough nodes in that way, particularly ones that are in other jurisdictions.

Source?