It would be appreciated if your views are given without being influenced by others considered reputable
I want to understand what people individually feel about this. Thank you.

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Okay you can take it as a pessimistic POV but ever since the interest by government and institutions I feel we are losing on decentralization and privacy.
Don't get me wrong, I love to see Bitcoin price rising and adoptions but it's like the reason is rising is flawed. People joining for sometime now are only in it for the potential price increase and care nothing about a decentralized system.

It's subtle but it's happening, checked X during the exch shutdown and I saw many branding people that push for privacy as scammers. They were the majority.

We thought with all this news and mainstream many could learn about Bitcoin but no they barely know a thing.
We are compromising and giving excuse that it wouldn't get worse like the rise of KYC compliant exchanges or ETF approvals. But compromise is the first step before full acceptance.

Humans are political animals as they say, as long as there are group of people there must be politics. I'm sure this isn't different in the developers community.

Would government fold their hands and not try to make devs push a protocol that would favour them? I doubt, I understand we have miners and full nodes for checks and the open source process and peer review make covert protocol changes difficult. But we can't deny that Dev still have some influence (I used them as example since they are smaller in numbers).

I know we survived without government support and can survive without it but What are your thoughts on the direction we heading?