I'll admit, I've lost the romance.
Quick story: I got into crypto trying to launch my own VPN platform and dealing with MBAs and VC's that wanted me to price gouge my users. When cost per user was ~$3/mo everyone wanted my data and for me to compete on price with $100/yr plans.
The only way to not be surrounded by these vultures in 2019-2020 was to pivot to a non-profit model, but I wanted to leverage a DAO to guarantee my users "ownership" and leverage wallets as identities to protect my users.
This sent me down the crypto rabbit hole and while I understood what BTC was back then, the lack of scalability, volatility, and no smart contracts prevented me from even considering it. After about 3 years in the ETH ecosystem I realized it's been co-opted by banks (ETH -> fragmented DeFi -> stablecoins -> banks). I also realized Proof of Stake is really just an oligarchy of validators as well and definitely not the future for a sovereign community of anons.
So I dug deeper into blockchain technology and decided PoW was the only thing that could maintain it's social contract with users. Unfortunately, I've yet to find a chain that scales, supports smart contracts, and isn't sold on the idea of L2's as a model for scaling.
The BTC community seems to be the worst. 90% of the active threads here is all about gambling (it's been >10 years, there's other use cases people) and anyone trying to have a conversation about updating this "protocol" is viciously attacked online. We love lightning network, but it's mostly custodial tx's and Phoenix is the sole provider of infrastructure for non-custodial txs making the infrastructure itself centralized.
PoW chains seem to naturally turn into a plutocracy of miners and now that big banks are buying all the BTC they'll follow their old playbook and buy the miners once the returns start to diminish.
The narrative online seems to correlate fiat gains with technical proficiency and performance, but this is just more zealotry.
My positive outlook tells me that this attention should kick the core devs in the ass again to start having some serious conversations about how BTC scales in while supporting global non-custodial txs.
The BTC conference this year seemed to have some heretics at least. Respect to Jimmy Song:
https://snort.social/nevent1qqs0hn3kevh5lp5ftqzggzscymsqkdhp9e242ev5rzpjaahvaednq8czyzmuda53tnaf5chl76slqfsym6yvy0rvd3k3hrmzclxpqaylxplgzqcyqqqqqqgt5q25rSo I'm staying positive and hopeful, but I'm not holding my breath anymore. There are a number of other chains that are prioritizing distribution by choosing ASIC resistant algorithms, support sharding, subnets, and smart contracts. Some are even experimenting with a commodity backed stablecoin which will allow for proper DeFi without banks. Hype and Fiat gains are not a good measure of technical prowess.
/the end.