The whitepaper shows it was intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash". It did clearly fail at that goal since it has none of the privacy of cash and so on.
You can use bitcoin completely/as anonymously as cash if you wanted to, the same way you’d have to put in a bit of effort to have a completely anonymous cash transaction.
Monero (XMR) which is a fork of bitcoin, is much closer to actual cash
Monero is fine. But how can you even use bitcoin anonymously now? Even wasabi and samourai wallet are shut down as far as i know. Seems highly risky to use any tool like that since i dont know what the consequences will be in the future. Joinmarket? I'm sure it is possible but it is error-prone, takes so much effort, time and fees that i see it as a failure
I have used it, but i dont see how it is related to being able to transact privately. As soon as you do anything linked to your name with those coins puchased on bisq, the whole batch is linked to your identity
Arguably, that's exactly what it was designed for.
There was a very contentious split many years ago now (Bitcoin Cash vs Core fork) regarding this point. Until then, it was taken for granted that block size would continue increasing in proportion to transaction volume in order to facilitate such use. This was Satoshi's expectation, and there was little-to-no discussion otherwise. Quite suddenly, a few powerful, well-positioned people (with conflicting interests in the form of their Lightning side-chain solution) conspired to form a consensus of limiting on-chain transaction bandwidth via astroturfing and comprehensive censorship.
Whether they were responsible visionaries with the foresight to avert disaster using a novel solution, or spiteful saboteurs driven by greed and power, is up to the reader. Un/fortunately, they were very successful.
You could use something like Litecoin, Solana, maybe even Ethereum if you’re willing to pay the fee.