Thanks for mentioning Andreas. When I started with Bitcoin, he was my primary influence. I don't remember him talking about price or "digital gold"—his focus was freedom, neutrality, cross-border payments, alternative financial systems. His five pillars of an open blockchain still resonate with me. The timing of his declining relevance in the Bitcoin community coincided exactly with the tribalization around Bitcoin Cash. His vision was Bitcoin and Ethereum complementing each other, but that perspective came from a pre-tribal era. Like Satoshi, I think Andreas expected things to evolve differently.
I'm still uncertain about Bitcoin Cash. When the fork happened, I sided completely with small blocks—I was probably at my most "bitcoin maximalist" then. I approached it from technology and decentralization, but I was also more consumerist, caught up in speculation, and didn't understand the broader implications. Then I tried MakerDAO and other early Ethereum protocols, and everything shifted. I began seeing the power of smart contracts the way Andreas did, but I also witnessed the Bitcoin community's growing hostility toward them. To me, smart contracts were an obvious continuation of Satoshi's vision—another form of totally open, unregulated markets. I didn't view ICOs and the surrounding chaos as proof of failure; quite the opposite. Every open market begins in chaos, then gradually develops understanding and self-regulating mechanisms as participants learn. I still don't understand Bitcoin maximalists who actively fight open markets. The contradiction wasn't obvious initially, but it compounded over time.
Even as an early Ethereum enthusiast, I supported small blocks and championed Layer 2s when they emerged. My skepticism only developed these past 2-3 years, watching L2s proliferate. A friend who was skeptical of L2s warned me they would invite greater institutional and VC influence trying to capture the space—reality has largely vindicated that warning. We achieved a highly secure, decentralized base layer, but everything built on top exists in fragmented chaos. Nobody can definitively assess how decentralized it actually is (I see strong parallels with Lightning Network). We traded decentralization for opacity. I realized this isn't a binary problem—it requires understanding context. The most technically pragmatic solution isn't always best for long-term ecosystem health. L2s and small blocks offer immediate comfort and scalability, but they defer chaos to later stages and other layers. Ethereum committed to a rollup-centric roadmap, and most people stopped caring about L1 scaling like sharding. I'm no longer certain this was the right choice.
Which brings me back to Bitcoin Cash. Through my Ethereum experience, I'm revisiting old decisions and questioning whether the solution was ever as binary as the community framed it. Perhaps a middle path would have served us better in the long run.
