[cosmodisk]

I don't see anything successful about it: 1) Absurd levels of electricity consumed 2) Majority of BTC is not used as an asset,or even as currency,but purely as a tool for speculation 3) the surrounding ecosystem is worse than FX world, which is already as bad as it gets 4) No real anonymity either: any meaningful amount needs to be exchanged to Fiat sooner or later. 5) Adoption is still very very low and won't change with such volatility.

Also, financial protocols!= currency.

[gowld]

"it's harmful" and."I don't like it" doesn't make it unsucessful. Cigarettes are wildly successful. Thousands of people, from uninteresting individuals to billionaires and banks, are spending their resources to engage with it.

[cosmodisk]

Define success. Are cigarettes successful for their manufacturers? Yes, absolutely,they are swimming in money. Is it a success to other stakeholders? No, it's not. Bitcoin is a huge success to the speculators riding the wave or early adopters who held it long enough. If smaller groups benefit from it, that doesn't necessarily mean it is universally successful.

[wanderingstan]

This is like arguing the iPhone was not a "success" because walled garden appstores are bad, or because app addiction is bad. Either of those may be true, but the iPhone was still a sucess.

Bitcoin was a daring experiment in game theory, open-source protocol, and human incentives, and is a success by any common-sense measures:

- Adoption of the protocol

- Money devoted to protol

- Human attention given to the project

- Number of computers running it's code