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?
Exactly. However, most people aren't seeing the big picture. They're blinded by greed, as BTC continues go up in price. While government and institutional support helps increase demand for the cryptocurrency (which leads to higher prices in the long run), it will only make Bitcoin more centralized. Or at least, concentrate most of the circulating supply in the hands of a few. Fortunately, network nodes and miners are out of big institutional investment companies' hands. At least for now. Let's hope they don't gain control of most of the network hashrate and nodes in the long run. Else, Bitcoin would be doomed.
Considering how institutionalization poses a huge threat towards decentralization, I'd say our only option would be to move to Monero for complete peace of mind. Litecoin is also a coin to consider. This is for the paranoid, of course. But if you're like the average person who doesn't give a damn about decentralization + censorship-resistance, using BTC or any of the centralized "shitcoins" on the market will do just fine. Many things can happen within a decade from now. So we better be prepared for the worse.