The legacy of the block size debate is it exposed the politics behind how Bitcoin actually works. I remember when I got into Bitcoin, just like everybody else, the first thing I admired was how this system was designed without anybody in control. Nobody could freeze your transactions, nobody could charge you back, there was no central authority. Bitcoin doesn't care whether you're a murderer, saint, North Korean dictator, or a 12 year old. Bitcoin just is, it works for everybody without passing judgement. When you start out, it's really easy to see Bitcoin as being something that exists in objective reality, just like every other piece of software, and even physical gold. The problem though is that this isn't true; Bitcoin is subjective money. Satoshi didn't fully understand the implications of his invention, and that's not a dig at him either because most inventors don't.

Let's take physical gold as an example. Gold exists in objective reality, whether you ascribe value to gold or not is up to you, but were somebody to give you physical gold and you had the tools to verify the purity of it, you can't deny the reality that it is gold. Gold is the most objective form of money, but even fiat money is quite objective. With fiat money, the value and trust comes from government, this leaves less room for interpretation and subjectivity than you might think. Even though Donald Trump might be president, if you were to take the angriest liberal alive, somebody who doesn't even believe in the legitimacy of his presidency and government, even he won't refuse dollars because "those dollars were printed by Trump, his government is illegitimate, therefore those aren't real dollars, sorry". Even if this liberal has lost trust in the legitimacy of the head of the executive branch of his government (the branch that prints money), the power of fiat money is so strong that it blocks him from following his beliefs down to their logical conclusion, he still holds on to the collective delusion of the dollar, to do otherwise wouldn't even enter his mind.

For whatever reason, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general behave more subjectively. Perhaps it's because these systems are individualistic; you verify the blockchain yourself, you don't trust anybody else to do it for you, why would you? Bitcoin exists as an idea in your head, each Bitcoin user is different with respect to changes they would accept or reject. Almost all Bitcoiners would reject the 21 million limit being increased; but there exist gray areas like block size, where the tolerance and threshold for change is really subjective and varies wildly from user to user. I'd probably be OK with the block size being doubled. You might not be. You might want it reduced. Let's hypothesize there was a change that split the community cleanly in half: for whatever reason, one half of the community accepted the change, the other half rejected. This then led to a blockchain fork, with equal amounts of hash power, would anybody be able to objectively say which fork was the real Bitcoin?

Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV are years ahead of us with some of these issues, rather than ignore the politics present in these systems, as Bitcoin is doing, they seem to be fully embracing it. Economically this will damage them short term, but by figuring this stuff out, they are learning some important lessons. With the BSV fork, we saw that it's possible for a divergent chain to be valued more than it's competing origin chain, even if it's only temporary. Bitcoiners feel a natural disgust when they look at what's going on in these communities, especially when they hear about Bitcoin Cash developers taxing miners and stuff like that, but the disgust they feel is coming from a place of insecurity, because these divergent Bitcoin spin-offs are exposing what was always hidden under the surface of Bitcoin too. It's not something that can be articulated well, but after the block size debate it was something that could be felt; a feeling that Bitcoin was a lot more subjective and therefore more vulnerable than we'd hoped.

Bitcoin is not apolitical money, it's hyperpoliticized money. Throughout history, when people in communities disagreed with each other, they simply killed each other until a winner emerged. This proved to be a less than ideal way to resolve disputes, so over time more democratic ways of deciding things emerged. Whether through violence or through voting, politics is played in a very narrowly defined battlefield and everybody intuitively understands that it doesn't go beyond its scope. These cryptocurrency systems bring politics into money itself, in ways that aren't predictable and for which there aren't any parallels in thousands of years of human history. Imagine a world in which a democrat and republican can't exchange value with one another, without an intermediate neutral form of money, because they disagree on money itself, one is using democrat dollars and the other is using GOP bucks -- both with totally different ideals and visions.

If I were to put you in a time machine and drop you off into the year 2120, and assuming Bitcoin still existed (or something claiming to be it). You would have to spend days researching every split and fork, every upgrade, the history of tradeoffs behind every dispute, etc, to finally settle on which variant of Bitcoin running at that time was the real Bitcoin. People still hate Roger Ver, years after Bitcoin Cash forked off because he's exploiting Bitcoin's biggest flaw, the fact that it can be subjectively redefined; Roger Ver is just the first, if Bitcoin really catches on, over the next few decades Bitcoin will be redefined again and again by some of the most powerful people and entities in the world, and just like those obscure BCH/BSV guys, one day we too might find ourselves on some dark lonely corner of the internet screaming into nothingness about "the real Bitcoin", to a world that doesn't care.