"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."
Except it failed completely at that. The blockchain has proven through real world use that it is unusable as a currency. By its very design, it is fundamentally impossible to scale it to even serve even a moderate sized city worth of transactions.
Scaling is a separate issue. I don't believe scaling is even mentioned in the original white paper.
1. This is far from proven. Scaling is definitely a problem, but I don't think it's at all been proven to be impossible.
2. You still have to admit that bitcoin has solved this problem at a small scale, which isn't nothing. Transactions without a trusted central authority are literally impossible with previous technologies.