Bitcoin wasn’t created to make bitcoiners happy. It was for freedom of money. We weren’t as concerned about making Bitcoiners happy as making free trade a real thing.

Chris was an extremely strong proponent of Bitcoin Cash and was a large reason we went past Bitcoin and supported it. We also decided to support some additional UTXO based currencies like LTC and Zcash. Eventually we wanted to also support ETH and ERC-20s. We wanted to capture as many potential users as possible. We didn’t discriminate against other coins. Chris wouldn’t have been working on Lightning or anything related because he was not a real supporter of it. It was also just not compatible with us to start building on. We would have had to build something similar to LNURL or Lightning Addresses and really gone all in on Bitcoin only and the team we had would not have gone for that either.

Lots of mistakes all around regardless.

bcash was never the problem. the reality is that no one was ready to spend Bitcoin on arbitrary good at the level of fees we saw. The software was fairly rough to use in spite of our efforts and more importantly really no good business model to sustain ourselves. The fork wars had no real bearing other than to cause a lot of maximalists to hate on us for supporting other payment options.