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.
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?
Let me start by answering your last question, I'm not saying this to disappoint anyone - I think the way it's going is really questionable how much privacy it will have in the future and the reason for that is the attempt of some whales to make more profit. The purpose for which Satoshi created Bitcoin and the current situation are almost the opposite. The real purpose of using Bitcoin is to protect your privacy and use it independently without anyone's interference. But KYC, ETF, big exchanges, AML rules are slowly going against the core philosophy of Bitcoin. I didn't actually tell anyone what it was for, I just wrote what came to my mind. Another thing, although I don't understand the technical aspects very well but as far as I understand that Bitcoin is open source - many people get worried when they hear this, but the reality is that very few developers actually write code. When political or financial pressure comes on one of them, such update proposals can come that, although they are carried out as "technical improvements", can destroy the principles of Bitcoin inside. We all know there is a full node or peer review, but how many ordinary users actually understand the update ? Most of them accept it blindly. So don't be fooled by the mere mention of "open source"—if we're not careful, one day we'll find that Bitcoin is decentralized on paper, but in reality, it's a puppet in the hands of governments and corporates.