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I think Bitcoin didn't resist institutional capture during 2015-2020—they embraced it through narrative control. The shift to "digital gold" wasn't about principles—it was about abandoning Bitcoin's original purpose. Peer-to-peer cash became "store of value". Scaling became unnecessary. Smart contracts and DeFi became threats instead of natural extensions. The Bitcoin Cash fork was messy, but it revealed the choice: preserve Bitcoin as a tool for economic freedom and innovation, or constrain it into a narrative institutions could control. Bitcoin chose the latter. They built walls around what Bitcoin could be. DeFi? Bad. Smart contracts? Unnecessary. Stablecoins? Scams. Anything that gave people actual financial tools got branded as betrayal. Later, when VCs moved to other chains, Bitcoiners claimed they'd been fighting institutional capture all along. But they'd already been captured—just by narrative instead of investment rounds. They'd let institutions define what Bitcoin was allowed to become.

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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.