You can also buy tons of stuff with USD. The only innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows you to do illegal stuff.
A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.
> You can transfer it around the world basically for free (transaction fees amount to the equivalent of pennies no matter how much you send).
This is also true of, for example, TransferWise.
> It’s immutable
This actually makes it worse than the existing financial system, because being able to reverse fraudulent transactions is a feature, not a bug.
> It’s gained widespread adoption, a while economy, thousands of businesses.
Also true of USD. You still haven’t demonstrated any advantage of Bitcoin other than illegal transactions.
Not for small to large amounts for less than pennies
>A more expensive and cumbersome way to do what you could already do with other tools is not “success”.
You're vastly underestimating the amount of people trapped in regimes where they cannot spend their funds abroad or risk having them devalued at whim.
doesn't that describe a lot of cryptocurrencies? or are you suggesting the people in these regimes use cryptocurrencies as an intermediary to transfer their local currency into more stable foreign currency?
What percent of those business denominate their prices in bitcoin?
What percent of those businesses do anything but immediately convert the bitcoin back into fiat the moment they take possession?
It is, without a doubt, successful.