[freech]

"Private blockchains are a different matter, and they will have applications in e.g. automating many transactions."

A private blockchain is just an inefficient databse.

"which is nevertheless very effectively backed by the government’s universal tendency to require said paper money for taxes, not to mention the inconvenient fact that if societal trust erodes sufficiently for paper money to lose its value, it’s highly unlikely an arbitrary string of ones and zeros in an arbitrary hard disk somewhere would fare much better"

I've never seen the argument made that paper money is going to lose it's value because societal trust erodes, it is losing it's value because people keep printing more of it. So yeah, I think Bitcoin already does fare better.