I see a lot of assumptions in your post, along with cherry-picked examples meant to paint all Core devs as having 100% of their stake in Bitcoin, while miners and exchanges supposedly treat BTC as a side hustle. That's not just oversimplified -- it's wrong.

I can just as easily cherry-pick devs who left Bitcoin and ended up working on competing projects. If a Core dev walks away tomorrow, they still have their BTC holdings, past donations, and reputation -- and can easily find work in any crypto or non-crypto related field without major consequences. There's relatively little personal risk involved compared to miners.

If Bitcoin fails, miners don't just lose status or funding -- we lose everything. Billions in ASICs, infrastructure, land, hosting, and long-term energy contracts go up in smoke. And unlike devs, we can't just "switch projects" and carry on.

You say miners are "disinterested" or "misaligned," but from the inside, here's the reality:

-We don't live on grants, donations, or academic prestige -- we survive on uptime, tight margins, and market volatility.

-Real capital is at stake -- from small setups to institutional-scale farms.

-Our investments are sunk and non-recoverable. If BTC dies, there's no freelancing our way out of it.

I know many miners who have gone bankrupt just when BTC price fell, let alone if the entire ecosystem would have gone to waste. On the other hand, I don't think Gavin Andresen lost his life savings when he left Core.

So let's not pretend only devs are aligned with Bitcoin's long-term success. Miners put real, irreversible capital on the line every single day -- and that is more skin in the game, whether you want to admit it or not.

I haven't touched much on exchanges, since I don’t have skin in their game -- but let's be real: if Bitcoin fails, every other cryptocurrency follows. The exchanges that are now raking in billions in daily volume -- They will go to exact zero, if the person you talked to is shorting BTC to make a quick buck or waiting to liquidate his clients, that's a different story, the reality is, his exchange will go down the drain the moment something bad happens to Bitcoin.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying developers have no skin in the game. Everyone involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem -- whether you're a dev, a miner, or someone who just bought a few sats -- has something at stake. We're all in this together, to some extent.

Also, I'm not making claims about who owns more BTC or pretending to know the personal finances of any dev or miner (more so a response to your statement about me knowing about other people's finances). My point is not about absolute numbers. It's about risk exposure and the aftermath consequences if things go south.

As a miner, I know that if Bitcoin fails, the financial hit I'd take would set me back decades. And from where I stand, I believe the percentage impact on my life and future would be greater than what many Core devs would face -- again, not in absolute BTC terms, but in real, personal economic damage.

So when we talk about "skin in the game," let's recognize that it manifests differently for different people -- and for some of us, the consequences are far more immediate and irreversible.