[swombat]

Bitcoin's success is extremely easy to understand.

Socially:

Some people don't trust governments to handle one of the most powerful collaboration technologies ever invented (money). All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled. Some have behaved in a trustworthy way, many have not. And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.

So these people set out to build an alternative that they believed governments couldn't control.

Technically:

The interesting key advance that made Bitcoin interesting and successful was coming up with an algorithm that solved the problem of getting parties that don't trust each other at all, to collaborate on maintaining a global ledger to everyone's benefits, without them having to even know about each other.

This is already a feature of money (I don't need to know about you to have indirect financial ties to you) but was not true of the financial system itself until Bitcoin.

[__alexs]

> All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled

Company scrip, community currency, hawala have all existed for centuries.

Also Bitcoin is also government controlled. It lacks the anonymity required to protect participants making it trivial for nation states to influence. And it does nothing to prevent the centralisation of capital that causes so much manipulation in traditional currency systems.

> And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.

Over the long term the probability of failure of all systems is 1.

[derangedHorse]

> Company scrip, community currency, hawala have all existed for centuries.

All of these have the problem of centralized and permissioned issuance, where one entity can arbitrarily inflate the supply without the knowledge or consent of others.

> Also Bitcoin is also government controlled

In what way?

> It lacks the anonymity required to protect participants

This is false and does not make it government controlled. I’ll concede that there are many ways for one to lose privacy when using Bitcoin though.

> And it does nothing to prevent the centralisation of capital

The ‘centralization of capital’ isn’t an issue Bitcoin aims to solve. One of the big problems Bitcoin solves is the unjust accumulation of capital via arbitrary issuance (IORB, RRP, loans via newly created bank deposits, etc.)

[falcor84]

I wonder what it says about me that the only counterexample that came to me is the use of Nuka Cola bottle caps in the Fallout games. But that only works in a post-apocalyotic setting, when there's no longer any manufacturing capability.

[nobodywillobsrv]

That explains why Something like bitcoin might emerge but not specifically bitcoin. Presumably first mover advantage etc.