Re: I don't like the idea of governments holding millions of Bitcoins.
Actually, it is most likely that Bitcoin will be much more valuable than Gold if it does become a reserve asset of a similar weight. This is primarily because the market dynamics behind them are entirely different. Gold's supply is not constrained by availability of gold, but by its price and only by its price!
I understand your argument, but Bitcoin lacks the industrial/decorative use of gold. Thus I think both "disadvantages" (gold = potentially more available supply, Bitcoin = only use as currency/store of value, but no other usages), I think both assets can be quite well compared. I don't dispute Bitcoin could have a slightly higher potential, primarily due to the ease of storage, but I simply don't believe this makes up to more than perhaps 2 times of the gold valuation. And there's also altcoin competition as a limiting factor to the upside (this would be however a topic for another thread I think ...).
If you're right with this and I'm too cautious here, I won't cry however
Regarding the question of "social power", I am still a bit more cautious too, because I have seen debates which went in a very wrong direction (Taproot filters for "Ordinals", for example) due to some very vocal community members which can be seen as "Bitcoin maxis" but for whatever reason advocated for a direction which could be more harmful for Bitcoin (in this case, reducing the efficiency of full nodes and increasing the developer's workload). Thus I don't know if we really can count with all Bitcoin maxis for all challenges. I hope however that the dynamic you describe (people becoming increasingly "convinced" of Bitcoin's qualities and not returning) plays out like you wrote. At this moment I see both signs for optimism and pessimism -- the latter mostly because of the still enormous groups (probably 95%+ of the users/hodlers) who don't really care about Bitcoin, only about making profit.
And I fully agree that if Bitcoin is corrupted, be it be state-governments or other kinds of "influencers", then for me it has also failed and I would only continue to use it if it gives other types of benefits.
That said, this should be seen as a mild and persistent concern to which pro active educational measures must always be employed. As long as maxis are never silent and encourage each other to continue to educate, there will always be an unpaid army that is working on this problem.
Agree. The challenge is that the community isn't being overwhelmed with the new users (be them retailers or institutionals), so they can't install anti-Bitcoin (=anti-censorship-resistance) narratives.Regarding the market chaos in a "pro-FATF" and "anti-FATF" situation, there are for me two different scenarios to differentiate. First, there could be an "apocalyptic end fight", for example if the pro-FATF camp wants to integrate extreme measures like address blacklists. In this case, I agree with you that probably there would be enourmous market turmoil to expect due to early adopters / maxi sales, and thus I don't expect this situation to happen ... ever. (Even Satoshi perhaps may sell in this situation if he/she's still around.)
However, a more subtle kind of influence would be more worrying for me. For example, there's the signature aggregation proposal the devs are studying since some years already (CISA), which would make CoinJoin transactions the cheapest on-chain transactions, and a higher percentage of CoinJoins would of course increase privacy for Bitcoin a lot. Such proposals could be delayed or tried to be framed in a negative way by the pro-FATF camp. Such improvements would perhaps not bother all Bitcoin maxis, and thus perhaps the pressure to implement them wouldn't high enough that a pro-FATF camp with support from goverments with reserves who subtly threaten to sell (e.g. via "strategic reserve guidelines" which would trigger sales or "reconsiderations" if the proportion of "untraceable" -- e.g. CoinJoin -- transactions is too high in one of their "reserve cryptocurrencies") can't stop or delay it.
But as we seem to conclude the same, perhaps our differences in that discussion aren't that significant. I'm all in all moderately optimistic but these issues I name in this thread should be "reflected" and "reinforced" regularly by the community.