This means RBF provides no guarantees, it means that in BTC you must wait for confirmation(s) - as you restated. So BTC cannot be used as P2P digital cash, as it was intended.
If that makes you panic you should probably ask yourself why.
They've never did provide any guarantee.
About the digital cash part, I think that's debatable. The fact that people are used to transfer cash instantly, doesn't mean that any kind of cash have to do this. Bitcoin, by design, makes you wait for confirmations. Even if this "flaw" (as you seem to see it) would not exist, even then you would not be able to pay with Bitcoin at the grocery store (just imagine how big the queue would get!)
You can still pay with Bitcoin, however, for your plane ticket, for your vacation, for whatever you are shopping online. It still fits to the P2P digital cash use case and one can properly wait for the proper number of confirmations. And for the grocery store, .. we need something added to Bitcoin. Maybe LN, maybe something else.
And I'm not panicked at all, nice try to twist my words. Only newbies with insufficient knowledge can get panicked by all this ... story.
Look here... I thought we needed LN in 2016...
I want segwit. I think its great, because its a big help to getting LN. I really want LN, because I think that its an essential part of the road to allowing crypto replace fiat. I think blockstream are probably not bad guys. I'm open to the idea that not everything will be done on chain, and that's ok (provided Layer-N solutions share the same key attributes of being open source, peer to peer, do not require the use of their party, allows you to be your own bank etc)
...snip...
2 years of back and forth though and it became abundantly clear that I was wrong about the reasons for LN and SegWit. When SWx2 was proposed and as soon as segwit was introduced everyone reneged on the 2mb part. Fortunately Bitcoin forked so the original chain could be preserved. I still don't think block stream are bad guys, but it was very clear they were a business looking to make money off the back of bitcoin and that the original design did not fit with their plans. Lots of people sounded the alarm about LN, and side chains. They were all discussed and here we are today LN still not delivered, and Liquid is the preferred "Bitcoin" for Blockstream. Who knew? This is not nefarious insomuch as they are a business and they want to make money, but it should make you question why certain decisions were made.
Adam Pivoting from 2/4/8 to a hard refusal is the shining example.
I feel like I have followed what has happened over the last 10 years *very* closely, I have *always* considered Bitcoin to be p2p digital cash (per Whitepaper) and so when I see changes that move Bitcoin away from this it raises huge red flags. It was incredibly painful the split in 2018. I now realise this was my own cognitive dissonance. I saw BTC before me, that I had strongly supported all these years. I saw a "fork" that everyone was telling me was fake. I knew though the "fake" one represented everything I had always believed in Bitcoin and the "real" one had diverged and become something else. Letting go of BTC was the hardest decision in my life.
For some years I have wondered if I did the right thing, but the longer time went on the more relaxed I became.
Fortunately the situation appears to be coming to a head this year bitcoin core's removal of Whitepaper is tacit admission that it is no longer Bitcoin per the Whitepaper. The next step is CSW will pursue reclaiming the Bitcoin brand through the courts, people seem to detest this approach - but ask yourself if he is fraud then why would he be going to court. That is the last place fraudsters and scammers want to end up!
The people that know what's going on, but continue to deny the reality of the situation - well they only have themselves to blame.
The innocent people that do not know what is going on is who I feel for most.