If Bitcoin was a centralized technology, it would had crashed by now because the controversial would had been in the selfishness of the authorities regulating it to specially profit them alone and only investors who may be lucky to be on the same track lines with them probably knowingly and unknowingly would be the ones to benefit along with them.
~snip~
I would not agree that Bitcoin as a centralized project would have failed by now, because you forget that the vast majority of people still blindly trust their governments, and this means that trust in Bitcoin would probably be much higher than it is the case with a decentralized one.
What is certain is that many more people would have known about Bitcoin from the beginning because the government or governments would have done a lot of promotion - but what is certain is that Bitcoin would certainly not be as profitable as it is today, because if governments wanted their citizens to be rich, then the majority of the world would not live in relative poverty.
I tend to agree with you on this; Bitcoin was not initially accepted by many governments as it was seen as a thread to their power and control.
It's still like that, especially if you look at the trend that is slowly spreading around the world - Bitcoin is banned as a means of payment in Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam (I think even Nigeria), but it is allowed for possession and trading. This only shows what governments are actually afraid of, and I fear that there will be much more of this in the future.
What we are seeing now in terms of some governments holding Bitcoin and even the case of ETF approval were all possible because time have proven that Bitcoin is not as bad as the authorities and some critics made us to think. So at this point we are seeing the manifestation of the saying "if you can't beat them, join them"
It is possible to interpret things in that way, but I would still say
"if you can't beat them, try to control them". What is happening in the US is a classic example of trying to take control of something that is out of control, and in the case of BTC that means taking over key infrastructure such as CEXs, BTC mining and directing trading to big players through ETFs. If we look at the big picture, I would conclude that their plan is going very well for now.