As an actual currency, it's functionally useless. Even if every retailer on the planet were to accept it, the overhead for making the transaction is just a non-starter

New technologies such as the lightning network will fix this.

Because of that, it's entirely just funny money. Even further, since it's entirely a virtual asset, if the power goes out, your wallet goes with it

If the power goes out, your local ATMs and card readers will stop working as well. It'd have to take a global power outage to bring a crypto network down, and at that point we probably have more important issues to deal with.

The environmental impacts are horrifying. This fact alone means that it should all be eradicated. Destroying the planet for Internet funny money isn't an acceptable proposition

This is fixed by proof-of-stake.

For a decentralized currency, people sure do love centralizing under large exchanges, and the massive losses, thefts, fraud, etc. have shown that no matter how "decentralized" it's supposed to be, it's still susceptible to the same bullshit as any other currency

True, but it's a personal choice. You don't have to have to store them centralized if you don't want to. The same cannot be said about traditional currencies, as it's not feasable to have stacks of cash lying around.

Its high profile association with grifters, scammers, malware, and dark web shenanigans has completely soured its image in the public mind

Also true, but that has nothing to do with the actual currencies. The public image will improve once people learns how it works.

It's entirely a speculative investment scam now. There's no way to decouple it from that.

Maturity will make it decouple from that.