Bitcoin has already failed as money. Even most coiners admit that nowadays.
> Distributed consensus in a zero trust environment?
The whole cryptocurrency environment still relies on plenty of trust (exchanges, programmers, apis...). It's just less regulated, and this is why it is full of scams (https://www.rekt.news/).
Exchanges are needed only in the world where you need to transform bitcoins into other currencies.
Relying on programmers, api, etc: if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you can literally take the code and verify it yourself. It’s out in the open and it’s backed by cryptographically sound primitives.
Bitcoin has failed as money? Most coiners? Where is this coming from? Do you have anything to support these assertions?
For the transaction to actually take place it means that it needs to be appended to the blockchain, and whether it is appended or not is not up to you. Instead you have to rely entirely on others for that to occur. This is the very definition of trust.
there is nothing preventing you from running your own node or miner.
also, you are overextending the meaning of trust. Do you trust air when you’re breathing? Do you trust traffic lights? Do you trust you’re going to eliminate excess water through pee?
The point is that if you have a series of established rules and a way to verify that they are actually applied as designed, it does not really matter who applies them.
One miner cannot become a bad actor and invent its own rules.
The more correct answer is that your transaction has fees, which is why other miners are motivated to include it in their next block. (And also why a majority of the hashrate being centralized into a single entity with a singular will is a doomsday scenario for bitcoin.)
Of course, the concern that some particular miner might just have it out for you to a degree that outweighs this incentive, or who has some other incentive to not include your transaction, is more mitigated when there are more separate/independent miners/pools .
why would the miners discard a transaction and not another one given that the value they extract is the same?
Ah yes. Because I don't have to trust anyone that the order from BitcoinAmazon will arrive. Or that the house I bought on BitcoinZillo will actually be mine. Or...