OK, and that's fair. You disagree with the bitcoinxt vision. But, most people didn't at the time. Almost all miners adopted it. That was my only point, bitcoin is not this decentralized magical thing that's immune to capture. Someone somewhere prevented a popular fork from happening. And my implied, secondary point, it is impossible to improve bitcoin now, there's even a narrative in bitcoin that hard forks are just plain bad. You tell Monero bros to improve bitcoin, you can go look at how many privacy improvements have been proposed over the gears that failed. Mimblewimble, ringCT, there have been dozens of attempts to improve bitcoins privacy over the years. They don't want it. Well, we do, so we made our own thing instead so that we can have what we want. That's not defeatism, that's pragmatism.

I just saw Francis got that payjoin thing working on Bullbitcoin - haven't done the deepdive yet, but I think it depended on a BIP. Now imagine payjoin for opening and closing lightning channels. Privacy is here, and improving. My only point was that it would improve faster if the people that left and did monero would put that energy into bitcoin. Build what you want. Don't ask permission. Ring signatures on the base layer doesn't really make sense, imo. But could you do it with lightning or liquid or whatever?