Bitcoin is a failure. It promised privacy, low fees, decentralization, lack of censorship and sanctions. We ended up with a transparent centralized expensive block chain whose tokens are not fungible. It's just a memecoin now. It just happens to be the biggest memecoin on the market. It's the one everyone knows about.
Bitcoin's biggest success was proving that a cryptocurrency could exist and have utility. In that, it's inspired the creation of many successors which are superior.
Yes but unfortunately it garnered significant network effects along the way and it is still more prominent than the myriad of superior implementations of the concepts it demonstrated.
It was possible for Microsoft to ship Windows 98. Bitcoin is so ideologically fraught that there cannot really be a "Bitcoin 2" without some massive upheaval. If you invested in Microsoft in the mid 90s you'd be doing great. If you invested in literally Windows 95, oof.
