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.