This is like arguing the iPhone was not a "success" because walled garden appstores are bad, or because app addiction is bad. Either of those may be true, but the iPhone was still a sucess.

Bitcoin was a daring experiment in game theory, open-source protocol, and human incentives, and is a success by any common-sense measures:

- Adoption of the protocol

- Money devoted to protol

- Human attention given to the project

- Number of computers running it's code