i stand on neither side of any camp. which was the funny part of many years.. those standing on cores side kept trying to pigeon hole me into "the other camp" .. to me. there should be no camps.. if anything needs to be decided consensus will decide..
but consensus was not used.
as for your first statement.
"By that logic the original Bitcoin ceased to exist as soon as the first people other than Satoshi started contributing."
no. because they were contributing.
funny part is the github now moderated by a single team is not the same codebase as satoshi's sourgeforge codebase. yep satoshi never used github.. but even though satoshi used sourceforge and others used github they all agreed and found compromises to work on the SAME RULES and evolve equally at the same time on the same network.
no altcoin was created because of indicision between the contributors back in satoshi's day. even when there were many codebase sources on many different platforms and many different languages.
but now that many deem only bitcoin core is the 'trusted' source of network protocol rule selection... thats all changed
as soon as the band camp aruments of 'if its not core its not bitcoin' started.. thats when decentralisation died.
Given a large enough project, divisiveness will arise and not always be solvable within the same codebase.
Best case, this is how you get the plethora of alts exploring all kinds of aspects of cryptocurrencies or the variety of linux distros, feeding the need of different people and use cases.
Worst case, this is how you get drama and discord, such as happened during the blocksize debate and BCH vs BTC.
You obviously can't have both big and small blocks, so what BCH did when splitting off was the right thing. Obviously if enough people agree that bigger blocks are the superior scaling solution, BCH will eventually prevail. Just like ETH will overtake if its smart contracts and token economy turns out productive enough or XRP will overtake if people turn out to
be idiots prefer centralized solutions after all.
In practice, the market is the decision maker. Be it in market cap or in adoption and usage levels. That's the only consensus that counts when it comes to self-governance in cryptocurrencies.
That being said, while Bitcoin Cash did the right thing by splitting off, what Bitcoin.com does is rather questionable.
take LN.. its not permissionless.. its multisig. you need a counterparty to sign and agree to a payment arrangement.
Obviously you do, that's how trade works. I'm not sure how this makes LN any more permissioned -- in a meaningful way -- than on-chain transactions.