Bitcoin and especially bitcoin core and the main developer pipelines, is suffering from leadership fatigue, social fatigue, and technical debt. We are in a transition to a post bitcoin-core client dominated world, call it a multipolar client world. I believe bitcoin core itself wants this on some level and is doing its part to facilitate it, particularly with the libbitcoin-kernel project.

I also think the utreexo projects are going to wind up the future of bitcoin, with every wallet a validating client at some point in the future.

There's a lot of noise and chaos going on now, but it's all moving in the right direction.

I voted sane.

Autonomous peer to peer networks are chaotic. Ones worth trillions of dollars will be incredibly contentious at times. I don't think it can be any other way.

Like any system, bitcoin and its community will enter any possible state that it's capable of given the right conditions. One common state is divided and another is marred-with-fiasco.

Bitcoin's community will transition between possible states, divided and united included, more frequently than familiar systems because it lacks a centralized coordinator to impose such states.

Nothing in the bitcoin protocol promises it'll be pretty. The important thing is bitcoin will go on no matter how some people feel about it so long as it makes more of us freer and richer.