I was following the show for a longer time, but gave it completely up. I believe this conflict (and the capacity crisis) has set the whole crypto space some 5-6 years back.

I had great enthusiasm about this project, 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.

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", that would have been bound to cause a chain fork!

SegWit was a hack specifically designed to work around some design issues and problems with Bitcoin without the need for a hard fork. I had the feeling that nobody was much against SegWit in the start (miners: "we're ok with SegWit as long as we also get a regular doubling of the block size"), all until the bigblocker fraction started drumming up hate against SegWit. Indeed, most of the problems SegWit is trying to solve was actually solved in the Bitcoin Cash fork.

I still think 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.

Bitcoin Cash was no scam and is no scam, and Bitcoin.com has a history that is much longer than Bitcoin Cash. However, it's clear that Bitcoin is the big winner and Bitcoin Cash is the loser. 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? The biggest reason is that most of the users aren't holding the bitcoin themselves, they have them on the bigger exchanges. Most of the 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).