There are not “two sides” in bitcoin. It’s not core vs knots. It’s not devs vs users. It’s *way* more interesting than that. The only thing you can control in Bitcoin is what software *you* run. Literally. That is all. All of the emergent governance properties stem from that. From the inability to coerce others. Don’t like core? Cool. Code your own implementation! Don’t like it? There’s a bunch of really smart people doing that kind of thing, so run one of theirs. Put it through an AI and analyze it. Learn something. But don’t expect other people to do what you want. It’s just not possible. Bitcoin is anti-collectivist by its very design, but humans have collectivism hard wired into their brains. Even the most hardcore libertarians can’t erase millions of years of evolution. They want to form tribes. They want to convince their fellow man to act for the good of the tribe. But the bitcoin protocol is brutal. It suffers no democracy, no tribes, no voting systems. It boggles the mind. It confounds us. It doesn’t act like any governance system we have ever seen, and it’s deeply non human in its nature. It makes us go insane: Why aren’t the other people seeing what I’m seeing? Are they evil? Stupid? Are they all conspiring? Did the deep state pay everyone to embed jpgs into the blockchain? All of these questions are our inability to face a governance system that is antithetical to human existence. It is the reason for Bitcoin derangement syndrome. It is the reason so many people have rage quit through the years and started their own coins, with a nice side benefit of self interested dreams of riches and cult leadership, of course. You only get to decide what software *you* run. That is all. Embrace it, and you discover an ability to predict game theoretic outcomes for Bitcoin movements. Reject this, and face Bitcoin derangement syndrome and myriad altcoins.