[shadowgovt]

The article is talking about cryptocurrencies in terms of adoption, not philosophy. By the metric of the article, if everyone adopts crypto because it makes it easier for them to trade in values pegged to fiat-backed dollars, that's still a win.

Compare and contrast open source's relative success vs. whether the Four Fundamental Freedoms / GPL model itself actually succeeded.

I haven't seen a metric by which BTC is considered a "killer app" (in any space other than "How can I buy things / conduct transactions my local government forbids or tightly regulates," and even that use case is falling by the wayside as the tools for LEO to datamine the blockchain for webs of criminal transaction activity have caught up...), and it's been around long enough that I think we can generally flag the BTC experiment specifically as "tried, found wanting." In this current global pandemic crisis, you'd think trust in central governments would be at an all-time low and people would be shifting their resources into BTC, and that doesn't appear to be happening at any grand scale.