lol oh my this is just too good. Did you even bother to read the paper? It's very pro-blockchain, as are its authors and their other publications. The piece merely identifies which areas they think are better suited for a permissionless (BTC/ETH) versus permissioned (XRP, Gov created) blockchain, and which areas are less suited for blockchain period.

They do not dismiss the technology, in fact they don't even delve into the tech. Even if this paper was super critical (it's not, I'll show you), it's one 7 page research paper made by 2 junior researchers up against a $450B+ industry. The paper actually instead points out areas where blockchain is useful. Before I go into that though, lets look at one of the authors personal websites:

I am motivated by revolutionizing how society trades and interacts. *Bitcoin and the security properties of its blockchain provide technical means to catalyze societal evolution. *My research therefore focuses on the security, privacy and performance of blockchain technology. Because this technology is still in its infancy, I largely focus on understanding and quantifying the tension points and tradeoffs in terms of security, privacy and performance, with the goal to build a mainstream, scalable, open, and decentralized blockchain.

You literally just cited a major Cryptocurrency advocate that frequently lectures at Cryptocurrency conferences, like the scaling conference in Hong Kong.

How dense can you be?

Alright, lets go into some snippets from the paper you posted.

Regarding banking/finance:

For financial applications, blockchain technology seems well suited in general, since parties are generally risk averse and do not want to rely on strong trust assumptions.

The central bank may, however, not want to act as a verifier for every transaction and may only act as a certificate authority giving out licenses to banks to participate in the system. This means that all writers of the system are known and we can use a permissioned blockchain. Whether the chain should be publicly verifiable is a matter of opinion, i.e. the blockchain can either be public or private. On one hand, banks likely want to keep their monetary flows private, on the other hand, having public verifiability may increase the trust of the public in the monetary system. As mentioned in Section 2.2, this tension between transparency and privacy can be resolved at the cost of efficiency by using cryptographic techniques to provide privacy while also ensuring public verifiability.

While current systems (such as Ripple) are not yet able to provide trustless intercurrency money transfers, the future development in this area looks promising. Many central banks currently research the possibilities of using blockchain technology for interbank payments and with centrally issued on-chain currency, the value is defined by the actual value of the currency and thus interchangeable. If countries collaborate in designing their blockchains for interbank payments, they can be designed in a way that allow interaction between chains, e.g. to provide atomic cross currency payments as shown in Figure 4. This can be done using techniques that are also used in off-chain payment networks such as hashed timelock contracts [10] or by instantiating the blockchains as satellite chains [11]. In such a system, banks that have accounts on multiple chains can be used to exchange currency and route payments atomically internationally while removing the trust requirements of the correspondent banking system.

Regarding the DAO:

As the goal of such an organization is to be governed in a completely decentralized way and the investors generally don’t know or trust each other, a permissionless blockchain is naturally a good fit for such a design: The system is required to store some state and multiple mutually distrusting and possibly unknown writers exist.

Decentralized autonomous organisations are, however, a special case. For some applications a dedicated permissioned blockchain may be useful for a single DAO. In most cases, however, DAOs do not require their own blockchain but are instead better suited to be build on top of an existing blockchain with an already existing currency (such as Ethereum [2]).

Lets keep going, regarding smart contracts they say:

Since contract partners do not usually fully trust each other, blockchain technology is suitable for this application if the parties do not want to rely on a trusted third party, because it can simplify trustless protocols between multiple parties. Depending on the setting and the requirements, a permissionless blockchain or a permissioned blockchain can be used.

Finally, overall:

We conclude that depending on the application scenario, there are indeed valid use cases for each, permissionless and permissioned blockchains, and centralized databases that need to be determined carefully.

But hey lets go into more detail with less direct use cases, here's cautious approval of use in Internet of Things:

As the system is inherently decentralized with entities that do not trust each other, using a blockchain seems natural. However, as with supply chain management (cf. Section 4.1) the interface between the physical and the digital world poses a potential problem. If computers supply values that were read from sensors to the blockchain, the blockchain does not guarantee the correctness of these values, i.e. if smart contracts behave according to values supplied by sensors, the sensors – and whoever controls them – necessarily need to be trusted. For many cases, if e.g. only automation is desired, a blockchain may not be necessary if a trusted party can be used instead. In other cases, the specific trust assumption have to be studied and evaluated carefully to determine whether the use of a blockchain provides additional value.

E-Voting is a potential growth area, but nothing exists yet and it needs to be hashed out waaaay more:

Due to the requirements, it seems reasonable that blockchain technology can help to achieve some of the desired properties. However, to the best of our knowledge, so far no solution has been proposed that has been shown to be secure, verifiable, and private and there are still many open challenges.

Benefits of use in Proof of Ownership with or without additional trusted parties:

Proof of Ownership for intellectual property is an often proposed and straightforward use case for blockchains. If the creator of some digital object wants to prove ownership at a later time, he can use a public blockchain as a time stamping service by committing to the digital object together with his identity, e.g. with a hash, and publishing that commitment on the blockchain. This allows to later prove that the object existed at that time and was associated with the respective identity. While this does not fully prove ownership, it does provide evidence of ownership if no one else can show that the object was previously published. Instead of using a blockchain, a trusted third party could provide a proof of ownership, e.g. a patent office. A public blockchain, however, eases the process of providing a proof in a decentralized way and without disclosing details of the digital object.