If you've tried linking distributed Oracle databases between just a few different sites, you'd understand this has tons of failure cases and is, in fact, not a solved problem, even in the centralized world.
(Bigtable probably gets the closest these days, if you want proprietary and not globally auditable.)
That is nice. But can I, and everybody else in the USA successfully use Bitcoin on Black Friday? According to the National Retail Foundation, in 2016 over 101 million people went out on black friday to buy something. If Bitcoin could somehow 10x its transaction rate to even 40 transactions per second (which it can't and probably never will) it would take almost 30 days to process every order. At its current rate of 4tps, you are looking at about 292 days--during which, according to Wolfram Alpha, Venus will have made 1.3 trips around the sun.
So again, yeah, great job. Bitcoin solved some technical problem. Go team! But who gives a crap if some technical problem doesn't solve any real problem? Isn't that what we engineers exist to do? Solve real-world problems?
That shouldn't diminish all the other things that BTC does successfully.
Also, Bitcoin settles transactions in 30 days, merchants get their funds in 30 days if they are lucky to not have the charge back.
Apples and oranges.
That is one reason why I prefer centralised to decentralised. I have yet to see a justification for the cost of decentralisation. This cost is an important thing, not a trivial thing.
Other reasons include but are not limited to the governance mechanism of things like bitcoin not being demonstrably better than the governance systems of any other currency, but that’s a much longer topic of discussion.
