I'm not saying Bitcoin Cash had the right answer either. The right path was probably somewhere in the middle—preserving Bitcoin's utility as peer-to-peer cash while maintaining decentralization and building toward programmable money. But that required coordination, nuance, and willingness to experiment. Instead, we got an enormous coordination failure. The community fractured into tribal camps, each claiming the one true vision. Bitcoin maximalists rejected all innovation. Bitcoin Cash pursued its own rigid orthodoxy. The middle ground—where Bitcoin could have evolved as a platform for economic freedom while remaining true to its cypherpunk roots—never materialized. Everything that followed stems from this failure. The tribalism, the narrative capture, the rejection of tools people actually need, the "price them out" mentality—all of it traces back to that moment when Bitcoin culture chose ideology over pragmatism, purity over utility, and walls over bridges.

It's interesting to hear your take of Bitcoin Cash and the "block size wars", given that much of the opposition around that fork was specifically about decentralization concerns; namely, that larger blocks would enhance centralization of node operators... I was pretty neutral about it at the time, and in hindsight I think that the right choice was to keep blocks small and push faster transactions on the lightning L2, which from my perspective (and Nostr Zaps are a really great reminder of it), just "works." In contrast, Solano and other corporate chains really went the opposite direction to create both highly programmable and "perfomant" blockchains, and I think the undeniable result is systems that are highly centralized and corporate-controlled. As to DeFI and smart contracts, my view as NOT a Bitcoin "maximalist" per se but, let's say a Bitcoin "majoritarian", was that Bitcoin would wind up being the core monetary layer, while Ethereum would provide the "programmable" medium designed for stuff like smart contracts.... This was, if I'm paraphrasing from memory, basically the take of people like Andreas Antonopoulus .