Thank you for offering your criticisms respectfully and in good faith.

>Doesn’t 1 pool account for more than 50% of the bitcoin network?

No. Another thing I love about Bitcoin is that it's totally open source, and the open source ethos carries through the whole ecosystem. Because all transactions conducted onchain are relatively transparent compared to say, SWIFT exchanges, there are a lot of resources online to verify things like this. At the time of writing, the largest pool (Digital Foundry) currently has less than 1/3 of the total network hashrate. See for yourself here. https://miningpoolstats.stream/bitcoin

>It’s theoretically decentralized, but in truth, you can only meaningfully contribute to the network (and have a real chance of mining a block) if you are already wealthy enough to buy the hardware.

This is a fair criticism, the average individual is not the typical profile of a miner. In truth, companies are the typical profiles of miners. For better or worse, this is how most of humanity collectively organizes efforts that require scale beyond what one person can offer, and that's increasingly true regardless of whether you're in a communist country or a capitalist one. A state-run enterprise is still an enterprise, after all. But it's not impossible for individuals to educate themselves for free, save up money for dedicated hardware, and participate. It may be financially restrictive to buy top of the line machines for people living in third world countries, but there are USB-scale ASIC miners that offer similar efficiency for under $100 USD. Now, the expected yield on these after electricity costs are factored in may be negative, so I'm not encouraging anyone to do this without doing their homework. A search engine query for "BTC mining profitability calculator" will bring you to many tools that let you specify your mining hardware and electricity prices for more precise estimates.

>The issue, imo, with your stance is that it’s all rose tinted theory.

Like I said, I am a biased partisan here, and I do tend to focus on the strongest presentation of what Bitcoin can be, this is a fair criticism.

>In theory, bitcoin is a decentralized store of value. In reality it’s just another thing, akin to a collectible, that is bought and sold. Its value is based on what people are willing to pay, not based on what you can do with a bitcoin.

I'm buying, even at all time highs, and I'm willing to pay, because I believe in what Bitcoin can be. If you think I'm the metaphorical "fool being parted from his money", I'd invite you to take the other side of the trade and profit from my willingness to buy what I see value in. That's how markets set prices, that's how we're supposed to do this.

>In theory, bitcoin is government proof, in reality governments all over the world place restrictions on trading crypto. It’s so difficult to trade bitcoin for fiat without going through some kind of bank, that governments still have enough control as to make the “government proof” argument moot.

I am sorry if I gave the impression that Bitcoin is completely and impregnably government proof. When I said that "Bitcoin makes it fundamentally and systemically difficult to exercise force against the network to shove in changes that the actual users of Bitcoin do not want", I didn't mean to suggest that makes it impossible, just fundamentally and systemically difficult - i.e. it has been deliberately designed to resist that pressure.

>Just look at the price of monero after being delisted from Coinbase in anticipation of US regulation.

Monero is a very different idea than Bitcoin, and while I am also a big fan of Monero, it is outside the scope of my advocacy for Bitcoin in the comment section of a post about Bitcoin.

>At worst, bitcoin (and crypto) is a greater fools game. You gain bitcoin with the only utility being that its price swings so much that you can sell it for a profit.

That's not the only utility I find in it. I will keep being the fool. I am buying at $75k+, I will be buying at $750k+, I will be buying at $7.5m+.

>At best, it’s just another payment system owned by very wealthy people. (Like ethereum)

This may be true from an objective point of view, but it's also true that the current alternative, the US dollar, is definitely not just owned, but controlled by the very wealthy, and is also used to coerce and internationally bully, in ways that Bitcoin does not allow.

>There’s a lot of theoretical benefits to decentralized currencies and governance free economies, but crypto (at least the cryptocurrencies we have today) embodies none of that and practically is a vehicle for gaming and scamming, as we’ve seen.

I'm familiar with Bitcoin's historical connection with scammers and bad actors. New technology tends to be adopted early by those who will profit from it. Pagers and cell phones were huge with drug dealers and sex workers. That isn't a condemnation of pagers and cell phones, is it?

By 'gaming', do you mean like 'gaming the system' / fraud, or like video games? If the latter, I'm not familiar with that. Could you please elaborate further?