Hasn't Bitcoin largely failed in these goals though? Not only is it volatile making it a poor choice of currency, but most people transact via trusted third parties for a variety of reasons. The concentration of mining in a few large entities also points to effective centralization of the protocol.
> Hasn't Bitcoin largely failed in these goals though?
No? It has been enormously successful over the last 14 years. Adoption is occurring exactly how you'd expect for a new form of digital gold/money that is outside of state control.
> Not only is it volatile making it a poor choice of currency
It's still very early in the life cycle of a new form of money. The market is still figuring out how to price it. That's not a problem inherent to Bitcoin itself. Also, the volatility is a side-effect of growth, which is a good thing if you're saving your wealth in Bitcoin. There isn't a stock or asset on Earth that has seen the type of price appreciation that Bitcoin has, that hasn't also had enormous volatility. Apple, Tesla, Amazon, you name it. You can't have price growth without volatility.
> most people transact via trusted third parties for a variety of reasons
How do you know this? Do you have a link that analyses proportion of on-chain transactions that are done through a third party and done by a peer? Not sure how you could possibly know this.
Also how could you account for off-chain transactions through the Lightning network? There's some custodial services on LN too, but plenty of people and businesses roll their own nodes, which is incredibly easy with self-hosting solutions like Umbrel, Start9, RaspiBlitz etc.
> The concentration of mining in a few large entities also points to effective centralization of the protocol.
I assume you're talking about mining pools? There's essentially zero barrier to changing pools. If a pool is found to be misbehaving people will leave the pool and they'll decimate their market share. There's no incentive for pools to fuck up like that. Pools are just an abstract grouping of hash that has no structural impact on the network's distributed nature. Bitcoin's hashrate is physically distributed all over the world, which is what matters. So no, it's not centralized.
And if it is... show me the consequences of that supposed centralization. Can you show any evidence of transaction censorship by mining operations or mining pools? If so, were the censored transactions eventually processed by other miners/pools?
