Well none of this has any effect on the bitcoin network now does it? What's being controlled is subway ad-space and perhaps people's ability to transact with fiat (in order to exchange it for bitcoin).
> Well none of this has any effect on the bitcoin network now does it?
After having been stripped of most of the functionality that gave BTC it's original value proposition, you might be surprised at the degree to which it really does need ads like this to attract fresh investors.
BTC killed it's most powerful tool for cementing it's position as the leading cryptocurrency, it's network effect.
They killed it by merging "full replace by fee", making it trivial to cheat bitcoin-accepting merchants during times of higher network congestion. This made it even super risky for merchants and many opted out. They even had a much safer alternative (FSS-RBF) ready to merge.
They killed it by using the size of OP_RETURN to gaslight Counterparty, a company that was trying to build a rich smart contract ecosystem (yeah like Ethereum has now) on top of bitcoin. This was the second time the core devs' hatred of smart contracts killed new use cases for the coin. The first time led Vitalik to create Ethereum.
They killed it by blanket censoring on all the big bitcoin related communication channels all discussion about increasing the blocksize and/or building/supporting alternative BTC full nodes. This censorship completely fractured the community and directly led to the network fork called Bitcoin Cash. As a result of this fork, many of the oldest supporters and infrastructure devs left BTC forever.
Such as? It was started as an experiment -- I think it's been an insanely successful experiment. Don't be pedantic here and claim it was supposed to be some kind of money, but it's not.
It's much more than that now, and in inspiring Etherium and all the other new paradigms, it's totally changed alot of people's thinking.
> Don't be pedantic here and claim it was supposed to be some kind of money, but it's not
From the Bitcoin whitepaper, page 1 paragraph 1 sentence 1
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution
Transferring large sums cheaply without either party needing bank accounts, speculation, inflation/"doomsday" hedging, private transactions (public, but not necessarily tied to your identity), smart contracts (escrowed transactions for example).
The bitcoin whitepaper puts forth some pretty clear ideological statements. Similar things had been tried before, this was the first successful, widespread attempt. I would hesitate to call it "experimental".
You might call me pedantic as well, however I would argue that your definition of successful differs from others; it certainly is insane though, greed as a leading metric tends that way.