The trustless model where the paper insists that irreversible transactions are the only acceptable form of financial settlement is hubris and ignorance.
The paper never insists that irreversible transactions are the ONLY acceptable form of financial settlement. In fact it says "the system [financial institutions] works well enough for most transactions".
It points out that there is NO electronic system that allows no reversible transactions, as you can with cash. That's why it's titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". The author wanted something similar to cash, but electronic.
Besides that, discrediting a paper just for the introduction, which is just the opinion of the author regarding why they think such paper is interesting, is short sighted in my opinion.
Mostly, those people are looking to bypass the law.
Crypto currencies encourage illegal activity by design. The paper sets that out, in plain sight in the introduction.
Even then, I don't think a technology should be disregarded just because it has some use cases that you disagree with.
Also you vastly overestimate how much crypto is used for "illegal activities". The reality is that it's almost entirely used as an investment, similar to gold.
> Crypto currencies encourage illegal activity by design.
They definitely don't ENCOURAGE illegal activity. You can argue they can maybe facilitate it. It still is much worse than cash for illegal activity in most cases however.
And by the way, just because something is illegal does not mean it's bad. A lot of things that are legal and accepted now were illegal before. And even if you agree with all current laws in your country, remember that there are a lot of other countries, maybe not entirely democratic, with very different and unfair laws.
