No, my goal is not to avoid government involvement in the payment system, but to not have the government monitor every transaction. There is a difference.

The current bill/coin system works like that. The government/central bank issues the currency but they don't monitor individual cash payments.
I think that is okay.

You claim that is possible to make almost instantaneous payments with bitcoin. How? That is what I thought everybody agreed upon was not possible. You need to wait for
one or more blocks to be solved before you can trust a coin. That takes minutes. Even in the best case it is limited by propagation, with the speed of light, around the network which is slow. The only solution is to create another banking system on top of this. Bitcoin then becomes the backbone of an intebank transfer system, not what the population at large is using.
   
It is not just me that needs fast transactions. There is giant demand for fast transfers of digital cash from cell phone to cell phone, web shopping, stock trading etc. 

But, we might just have different expectations from a digital cash system.

Has anyone ever stated clearly what problem bitcoin is solving? It seems to solve the problem of payments that don't need to be fast. But who are the potential users of that beyond people who thinks it is theoretically interesting like people on this board.

Do people agree with me on this point: We still need another digital cash system, and that probably needs to be issuer based.