Your tl;dr does this paper a serious disservice. It is at once more enlightening and more entertaining than most other papers.

It's also accurate.

I didn't know there was an area of CS called "Byzantine fault tolerance". Now, I'm completely astonished by both the intelectual honesty of people that call their field something that reads "known impossible problem that can only be dealed with by increasing complexity" and that the same people try hard to deal with the problem without bringing extra complexity.

You realize that this is a humor column for USENIX's online magazine, right?

Yes, but its a fitting one that does pretty much characterize the field.

It also highlights how remarkable the Bitcoin whitepaper is…