So I just went and research bitcoinxt - it was before I got here. It's junk. I can't agree with doubling block sizes, and yes, I'm against the current humongous blocks, freaking 4 mb, absurd... Its not worth abandoning bitcoin over. Its good it lost. I feel really bad for anyone that sold because of that.

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.