[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