Yeah bitcoin is hardly the salvation it is vaunted as, but I do think its significance largely boils down to introducing the technical possibility of a decentralized financial system, if even only somewhat decentralized.
And I have doubts about its prospects as a hedge against inflation, but so long as it preserves popular confidence, it may yet work as a medium of exchange, if even one that doesn't scale globally.
Plus, we have stablecoins, which address some of the issues of Bitcoin and other speculative crypto assets may not be able to, i.e. stable stores of value, and medium of exchange, that can benefit from the T-0 transaction times and lower fees that blockchains can enable.
And yeah coinbase is antithetical to the libertarian knobhead promise, but this is where I think centralization can work, unless coinbase's BTC liquidity pool eventually amasses a significant enough portion of the supply to warrant a convenient "hack".
of what use is a decentralised financial system? We have already reached a maximum level of centralisation and efficiency. Now what we require is material plans for the species which are generated within kind.