I was following the "shitstorm" since BitcoinXT was launched, but eventually I gave it completely up. I believe this conflict (and the capacity crisis) has set the whole crypto space some 5-6 years back. Throughout those years, I've always been a "bigblocker" by heart.

I had great enthusiasm about Bitcoin, I was pushing Bitcoin as a means of payment, as a better alternative to other kinds of digital payments. On our fundraising fleemarkets I had posters saying that we accepted Bitcoins. I paid my son bitcoins every time he went out with garbage or did other housework.

But no, then I was told that Bitcoin is not meant to be used as a means of payment. It was a huge slap in the face. The reliability went down the drain and transaction costs went up through the ceiling. One of the cornerstones of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized - but is that true? Ultimately, the miners decide what transactions go in and what doesn't, and miners have the theoretical possibility to change the rules - it wouldn't matter if the miners really were decentralized, but centralization seems to be inevitable with any PoW-coin. And still is seems like the maintainers of the bitcoin core github repo are those who really define the protocol.

There was the big schism and great propaganda war. People started getting more important than facts and logic - the discussion was dominated by ad-hominem attacks and ad-vercundiam-arguments - and I'm actually quite much annoyed that you continue in this track - we should care about the technical arguments, not about who said what, who is right and who is wrong.

First one of the biggest arguments against raising the block size limit was "a hard-fork is unsafe, we risk to split the chain if not everyone manage to update in time". Then, over some few weeks only, the same folks that had supported this argument turned around 180 degrees and said that we need to force through SegWit through a "user activated soft fork", no matter what! The UASF would have been bound to cause a chain fork if it wasn't for the miners "caving in" through the SegWit2X compromise proposal!

At some point the Bitcoin Classic team published their FlexTrans proposal, an alternative to SegWit. From a purely technical point of view, I loved the FlexTrans proposal - it is a clean, modern approach and solves quite some problems with the Bitcoin transaction format - while SegWit is trying to work around the same problems by adding additional layers of technical debt. Still, the timing was horrible. Before the proposal was published, nobody was much against SegWit (miners: "we're ok with SegWit as long as we also get a regular doubling of the block size"). Then came FlexTrans and muddled the water, and suddenly the bigblocker fraction seems to have started a campaign drumming up hate against SegWit.

Bitcoin cash "had" to fork at the time they did to avoid SegWit. I thought back then that Bitcoin Cash was a disaster. It was pretty obvious that it would become just an altcoin, and from a technical point of view it wouldn't be much better than Bitcoin. Can Bitcoin do anything that cannot be done better by some altcoin? No. Also, with most of the bigblockers supporting the Bitcoin Cash project, there wasn't much pressure on the "2X"-part of SegWit2X anymore. Actually, quite some bigblockers wanted it to fail, as it would make it more likely that Bitcoin Cash would succeed. SegWit2X wasn't a good compromise, after all the main purpose of SegWit was to fix things without the need of a hardfork, what's the use of first pulling in such a complex patch and then anyway do a hard fork right afterwards? Still, it was a compromise, and a compromise was needed - hence, I was a big supporter of SegWit2X.

It's very clear that Bitcoin is the big winner and Bitcoin Cash is the loser in this propaganda war. The vision of the Bitcoin Cash supporters was that Bitcoin would be strangled due to the capacity cliff, while Bitcoin Cash then would become the real bitcoin. Some of them still hope for this. It ain't going to happen. The probability that another altcoin will become the new king is much higher than that Bitcoin Cash will become the new Bitcoin.

We haven't seen much capacity problems lately - why? I believe the biggest reasons are that Bitcoin has failed gaining traction and that most Bitcoin owners aren't holding the bitcoin themselves, they have them on the bigger exchanges. Most of those exchanges have off-chain internal transactions, and most of the exchanges collect lots of withdrawals into one big transaction, saving lots of blockspace that way. I guess soon transactions between the biggest exchanges will also go off-chain. Just like IPv4 still can scale thanks to NAT, Bitcoin can scale as long as people keep their coins on the exchanges rather than in their own wallets ... but if people do that, is it really better than banking? (and with IPv4, peer-to-peer is efficiently broken as everybody is using NAT).

I've always had big hopes for the Lightning network, and I'm quite sad that the "Big Blockers" were so much against it. That being said, at some point I got convinced that "The Lightning Network is no Silver Bullet", and I still believe so - though, admittedly I haven't paid attention to how the Lightning Network have progressed during the last year or two.

There has been conspiracy theories at both sides of the schism. I fully believe this schism happened only through internal forces, without any conspiracy going on. I do believe both sides of the schism really wants Bitcoin to succeed. At the other hand, I do have my own conspiracy theory. Some PR consulting company has been hired by the "powers to be" to keep Bitcoin away from mainstream adoption. Said PR agency is actively working at both sides of the schism, pulling some strings and pressing some buttons, a bit like Count Dooku and Palpatine incited the Clone Wars. The PR-company owns a lot of sock puppet accounts on most social medias. They have bought up the accounts of Theymos, hence they are controlling the moderation of r/bitcoin, Bitcointalk, the bitcoin wiki and yet some more forums. Most people in the debate (certainly including Roger Ver) fully believe in the Bitcoin vision - for the PR agency people like him are considered to be "useful idiots". The PR agency supports people like him with one hand, and at the same time they dig up as much dirt as they can with the other hand.