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I think it's worth mentioning if we're talking about "institutional capture" the ~2015-2020 era where VCs and the entire tech investment community basically decided that Bitcoin was Dead Tech and "CorpChains" like Solana were the future...
Heck, if you read a16z's "state of crypto", Bitcoin is barely mentioned.
The Bitcoin community seems to have, IMHO rightly rejected this kind of VC / corporate capture... But perhaps in favor of a shift towards a more insular sort of... anti-cosmopolitanism?
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I think Bitcoin resists institutional capture... To (re)quote Warren Buffet, it's "rat poison", but for the governments that try to ingest it.
What I worry about is the Bitcoin community adopting the position "this is our thing, it's NOT for the masses."
You already see this on Nostr... "Those people on the left won't understand Bitcoin, so why bother?"
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.
