🧵 1/ More than anything, one thing that gives me the biggest ick is hypocrisy disguised as critical thinking. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being critical of a project you pretend to believe or believe in. Healthy criticism is necessary. You should be able to question decisions, point out weaknesses, demand accountability and still genuinely support the mission. But there is a very obvious difference between being critical and keeping one leg in and one leg out. Some people don't actually have conviction; they have insurance. When things are going well, they say, “I've always believed in this.” When things get difficult, they suddenly appear with, “I told you this would happen.” They position themselves so that whichever way the story goes, they can claim they were right. That's not critical thinking. That's protecting your ego. And sometimes, what people call criticism is simply disappointment wearing a smarter outfit. Look at what happened during the Molten DEX tournament. The general principle in crypto has always been simple: use only what you can afford to lose. Yet some people allowed greed to take over, expecting that $1,000 would somehow become $20,000 overnight. When reality didn't meet that expectation and they ended up with $500 instead, suddenly the project became the problem. What also bothers me is the way people talk about Core's past contributors as though every person who once had a public-facing role was responsible for building the actual blockchain. That's simply not how technology works. There is a difference between a public-facing contributor and the people actually building and maintaining the protocol. Some contributors were regional representatives, community managers, educators, Twitter Space hosts or simply familiar faces within the ecosystem. They played their own roles, and some of those roles were valuable, but they were not necessarily the engineers writing the underlying code. The people doing the deepest technical work are often the least visible. They don't necessarily need to be on every Twitter Space. They don't need to become personalities. They choose to remain completely unknown to the average user while spending their days writing code, reviewing systems, fixing vulnerabilities, testing upgrades and solving problems that most of us will never even see. The Satoshi app era made us realize from its early phase that the face of a core blockchain are not necessarily the hands building it. So when I hear people say, “Those contributors are gone, therefore Core is finished,” I honestly wonder whether they ever understood what they were looking at in the first place. Some public faces came and went. That's normal. People change jobs. People move on. Community roles change. Social structures evolve. And yes, some people may have been more favored than others within those circles. Some of today's loudest critics were even beneficiaries of the same relationships and favoritism they now criticize. That is precisely why we should separate personal history from technological reality. A person leaving a contributor role on X does not mean the protocol stopped being developed. A regional contributor disappearing from the public eye does not mean the engineers disappeared. A familiar face no longer posting about Core does not tell you what is happening inside the codebase. Sometimes, before blaming the ecosystem, you have to honestly examine the person sitting in front of the mirror. Was it really conviction that changed, or was it greed that got disappointed? There is another part of this that I find even more interesting. Some of the loudest voices demanding answers, questioning development and declaring what Core should or shouldn't be doing are not builders. They are not engineers. They are not contributing code. They are not spending their time on GitHub solving problems or improving the infrastructure they claim to care so deeply about. They are users.