Yes, the market decides how useful it is, and given many online platforms that once accepted crypto payments have quietly dropped such features do to a lack of actual demand, and physical retailers, transit agencies, etc haven’t seen enogh customer demand to accept such payments when the vast majority of an already small number of transactions is between speculators rather than consumers buying real world objects.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Lightning are centralized systems, in that they are a single central way of doing things that is dictated by the majority of the people processing the transactions. These rules have changed and updated over the years, and a 2024 mining node would not be compatible with 2012 one for instance owing to the migration from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB.

Similarly, while we’re not taking about Etherium, it is a very similar in concept and up until recently consensus mechanism, and was forked to reverse a series of whale transactions back in 2016. Ya sure, Etherium classic maintained the transactions, but its also a tiny fraction of the size and relivence of the one that bowed to whale and miner pressure.

Back in BTC land, as of 2023 Antpool and Foundery together own 53.4 percent of the gobal bitcoin hashrate, which pretty directly translates to mining power. You say that if a mining pool acts unethically it will be abandoned in short order, but historical precedent seems to suggest the opposite. If a majority of miners decide on an alternate transaction history, historical precedent is that they win. This is hard to do by outright threat, but historically easy to accomplish by greed.

Yes, if you are scamming people on Facebook marketplace, elemanating all after the fact consumer protections is great. If you are honest, then it is not an typical problem because consumers are limited in how they can use chargebacks, and small claims court can deal with such matters, where as proving jurisdiction can be vary hard in crypto transactions.

The vast, vast majority of people, especially common people, are consumers, and consumers should always be inherently protected over businesses.

You should not have to pay a premium for fundemntal transaction security measures like disputability, reversibility, and hold times. An attacker which gains acess to my account should also not be able to bypass such measures, seeing as that is both the most likely and most damaging form of attack.

You suggest that no one is selling high value goods overseas in fear of fraudulent chargebacks, but actual market behavior doesn’t seem to be effected by this, likely because most international transactions use backed in fraud and holding checks instead of credit cards.

Bank transfers also have a several day going period during which they can be reversed, large transactions often have to be approved in person, and even smaller yet major ones by phone. Someone hacks into my computer and gains access to my wallet it’s empty while I have no recourse, if they do the exact same thing to my back account it’s an triviality to get it reversed if it’s even possible at all. That is why it is unheard of for anyone to be extorted, hacked, or otherwise loose acess to their bank account directly, yet people loose access to their crypt wallets every single day.

Neglecting the absurdly of claiming inflation is theft, you realize that the actual total supply of currency is completely decoupled from inflation and deflation outside of hyperinflationary and hyperdeflationary death spirals, right? One would think that this would be pretty obvious to someone with a knowledge of BTC, as what was enough coin to buy me a pizza in 2010 is now enough to buy a mansion worth nearly half a billion dollars in 2024, and yet as you say the total supply of currency has remained largely the same between thouse two dates. That is an absurdly volatile shift value on par with a small nation in complete economic collapse, not something which is posturing itself as a serious gobal one world currency.

I don’t know about what holidays there are in your part of the world when you can’t use cash, checks, debit, or credit cards, but they don’t seem to exist here in North Amarica. Massive bank transfers sure, but thouse take days anyway to ensure that all or most of my money can not be stolen, being unable to loose that much instantly is a key security feature, not a bug, and one should never be in the position where one needs to loose that much money in a day.

Cash still works when i’m offline, as do checks, debit, and some credit cards. They can all be used when both parties are offline, no internet involved. I don’t give a shit what the monitary system backend is doing during a gobal apocalypse when the gobal internet splits in half, I care about being able to by food after a hurricane or when the store’s internet is down, and my card or cash can do that while BTC by its very nature can’t be used without acces to the internet.