Does this imply an admission that Bitcoin itself is not usable as money?
LN transactions are simply 2-of-2 multisig transactions made on-chain, where both parties can change the balance amongst themselves, and where settlement is possible at any moment.
Bitcoin isn't being used as money on-chain. Why is this controversial? Bitcoin is the equivalent of gold, which was the hardest form of money that is accepted worldwide, before bitcoin was invented. Using it as a settlement layer for higher layers is the obvious scaling solution if you wish to remain decentralised.
That definitely wasn't the original goal of Bitcoin though.
What’s your point?
A technology should achieve its founding goal or GTFO?
What was the original goal of gold?
>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
It's fine that we've moved the goalpost as we've come to understand the limitations of this kind of blockchain, but it's also fine to highlight that "store of value that you can't directly transact with" was not what bitcoin was designed to accomplish, originally.
FWIW, I don't even own a dime of crypto, I just find it disingenuous every time people bring up "it's failed to live up to it's email title so bitcoiners moved goalposts" as some sort of smack down, when those goalposts were set before the network even went live.
I'd like to point out that the word "cash" is used differently in the cyberpunk community from before 2008. BCH and BSV both interpret it as "money used for every transaction" and thus advocate bigger blocks, while cypherpunks back in the day used it for "permissionless value tokens" (my phrasing here).
Ironically, trying to prove which chain is the "real" bitcoin by interpreting word from the introduction of the paper goes directly against the almost everything that is written in the rest of the paper.