The bitcoin project is successful because it acknowledges that humans are greedy and wish to be able to save for future generations and themselves.

This builds on that humans recognise what is moral and what is not not. When one learns about the fundamentals about bitcoin and compares it to how money works today one will realise that the centralised way of doing finance is not moral and does not benefit the broader public.

Developers in the bitcoin space, as with the internet in general, realises that there is no common law or decency that everyone adheres. Thus they know that in order to make systems work on a big scale one have to adapt to the motto “Don’t trust, verify”. This is the reason for our centralised services like Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. Since we were not able to trust a random online commerce shop online we have to lay our trust in a third party to follow through our payment. With bitcoin this will not be necessarily because we can ourselves verify that we in fact have received the transaction. Just like in the old days when we have cash in hand we know that the transaction have been successful.

The selflessness of Satoshi Nakamoto is also a big part on why the project is so successful. He initialised the project and did research, protocol development, writing and networking to get others on board. After that he started mining using his own electricity and resources and never taking any profit for himself. This shows that his vision was bigger than to get rich, but he wanted the project to become bigger than just an internet fad.

The fact that the creator also let the project continue to grow on its own and not dictate how it should be built further is also a large part of its success. People who disagree or have suggestions for improvements for the consensus model, design, decision making etc… Can easily in the open discuss them and come with advantages, disadvantages or counter implementations. The fact that no decisions happens behind closed doors as with governments or businesses makes it trustworthy and democratic.

Lastly I cannot avoid to talk about bitcoins actual application witch is digital money. Satoshi knew that people are incentives by monetary gains and greed. So he designed it so that the innovators and early adopters were able to mine a lot of coins due to its inflation structure.

As one can see there are a lot of reasons for bitcoins success and one cannot point to one single reason for its success nor able to reproduce all the reasons.