We have to be able to spend crypto to be free of control. It’s as simple as that. Whether it’s bitcoin or something else, we have to be able to directly spend it.

If not, it’s too easy to create bottlenecks by controlling exchanges or other custodial services we’d be forced to use just to spend our money.

This has always been the most important thing for making bitcoin successful, and ensuring its growth and true monetary sovereignty, but the maxis who took over the narrative and hypnotized bitcoiners in 2017 destroyed that ethos.

Before 2017 we all were constantly pushing for merchant adoption everywhere. Then the devs decided not to make any compromises with other parts of the community (who actually USED btc), to heavily censor r/bitcoin, and to go on a propaganda campaign to convince everyone this was the way.

As a result, all momentum for merchant adoption was destroyed. Completely. It had been on an awesome uptrend for years and it was completely killed by $50 fees. Now think about that. Either those guys were co-opted and malicious, or they were autistic and ignorant of the real world, but either way, they were severely detrimental to adoption of btc.

Then they went on a campaign to tell everyone to just hodl and that credit cards were great - we didn’t need to have merchant adoption - LN would come someday.

Yeah, well maybe it will, but that was idiotic. With a little bump like they did for allowing larger scripts, we could have avoided the insane fees for a few years and now have a decent LN, without destroying the entire ecosystem of merchants that loved btc. Without causing a major fork.

We did so much hard work between 2012 and 2017 and they fucked it all up, and I am pretty pissed about it. If you can understand that, you can understand why so many OGs supported BCH at the time. It wasn’t a scam. It was people wanting to be able to spend their fucking bitcoin like they’d been doing for the previous 4-5 years, and not be pushed into a corner and controlled by the USG controlling every on and off ramp.

We have to be able to spend bitcoin directly. Full stop.