"Easier is to use" is dependent on how you are going to use the currency.
Using cash locally when buying/selling stuff in person is in most cases superior to all other ways of using money.
OTOH, sending cash abroad is risky and problematic. SEPA and similar agreements exists but you still have to wait at least a day until the money arrives.
For a worldwide available paying network, bitcoin is not that unattractive. It's not the best option for all possible use cases, but what other paying option is?
I think the centralization problem is not as problematic as it may seem. It all depends on how much the miners are going to use their centralization power. But you have the same problem with central banks. Maybe even more because the bitcoin miners have something to lose if they act unreasonable.
'Normal' currency has severe problems which are important current issues for many and Bitcoin solves:
[1], Prevention of access - e.g. Nationwide Bank unserved queues & capped withdrawl in the UK on the days sub-prime hit is often the case in recession or bank runs.
[2], Censorship of payee - e.g. the inability to donate to Wikileaks by any means except Bitcoin when 'collatoral damage' incited US Senators to successfully pressure payment processors worldwide.
[3], Censorship of product: cash allows monetary civil disobedience like purchasing medical cannabis under prohibition.
The idea that you can be prevented spending your money makes money fallible (& as [1] just when you need it most).
If money has more power than ones vote this is wholly undemocratic.
Under Capitalism markets are unfree without freedom to spend one's wealth.
[1] Bitcoin is very difficult to keep safe, so most people will store it on sites like Coinbase / MtGox. These sites will inevitably lend other people money, which will lead to the same issues, in exchange for interest.
[2/3] Censorship of payee / Censorship of product. The perceived anonymity in bitcoin is largely fictional - you can extract the details of who paid who for what, and you can prevent someone exchanging bitcoin for fiat currency / goods. At the moment authorities simply don't care because the value of the transactions is insignificant in relation to hard currency.
None of these 'problems' (and society in general doesn't care about these issues) are to do with the currency. The first one is endemic to the concept of a bank which can lend more money than it has, no matter what currency it deals in. The second two are social / regulatory problems which won't be fixed by some new crypto-anarchist dream.
Thought provoking, I mostly agree with the following caveats:
I see the complete transparency of Bitcoin as a strength, it is certainly an antidote to the opacity of offshore / shell companies & tax dodging.
[2] & [3] they can't prevent payment using Bitcoins but one could be arrested after the fact and detained without computer access.
[3] This is why I said civil disobedience for [3]. Bitcoins are a public act.
National Currencies like sterling are not implicity bad and actual cash notes can be used for [2] but electronically Sterling et al. lack a lot of freedom.
[4] could be fees which currently dissallow national currency micro transactions, which have great utility for instance in a post advertising models & the micro-services revolution to come.
Snarky to say 'crypto-anarchist dream', crypto means something other than an abbreviation for cryptography in that context e.g. crypto-fascism - which many fear democracies are secretly becoming.
Bitcoin is not a dream it is a working implementation, usefully used daily.
With Open Bazaar now running, a free global market is enabled - without freedom markets are unfair and not proper capitalism. Adam Smith best points out the issues with crony capitalism & regulatory monopolies.
Bitcoin seems like healthy competition to me, national money is overly regulated in some ways and under regulated in others. Arguably to the benefit of the rich and powerful as most governments seem weak in the face of corruption by lobbying these days. Electronic (national currency) transactions are innefficient & overly costly, Bitcoin profoundly highlights this.
[1] Bitcoin is provably safe, the safety of ones possessions and computer is the current issue of the day. The UK & US government are promoting breaking encryption and making everyone unsafe.
It is good to have alternatives to help ensure regulatory over-reach can't happen as easily as it recently has.
'The "crypto" in crypto-anarchism should not be confused with the use of the prefix "crypto-" to indicate an ideology or system with an intentionally concealed or obfuscated "true nature". For example, some would use the term "crypto-fascist" to describe an individual or organization that holds fascist views and subscribes to fascist doctrine but conceals their agenda so long as these doctrines remain socially unacceptable.'
The crypto in crypto-anarchism is intended to signal a link with cryptography.
Miners can elect to not include certain transactions. I'm not aware of any evidence that this is happening now except with low/no-fee transactions, but the centralization of hash power makes it possible and, I would contend, inevitable, given sufficient time and adoption.
We already see this with the banking institutions that grow like barnacles on the side of the blockchain - they track where their customers spend coins, and blacklist the customer if they go to e.g. DNMs. If bitcoin gained wide enough adoption that people could cut out these middle men, the government would have much more incentive to inject itself into the mining process. There is already ample evidence they are doing various things on-chain to track the spending of large/active users, see e.g. https://reddit.com/r/DarkNetMarkets/comments/4fov8h/i_regula...
Edit: FWIW, Bitpay is one of these institutions. Steam doens't accept bitcoin, they accept fiat paid by Bitpay on behalf of someone with bitcoin.
Sure, there certainly is a risk of centralization in Bitcoin. At the moment Chinese miners probably are in a position to collude and censor transactions they don't like. However they can't steal assets, so they have a limited incentive to do so. Users only need to find one miner that includes a transaction in order to make a payment, albeit a slow one.
That doesn't mean it won't become illegal for miners to authorize a transaction.
From a certain legal standpoint (IANAL) the miner is facilitating all of the transactions which he creates a block for. This might make him liable if any of those transactions involve blackmail / extortion / money laundering.
