I'm coming from a far less maxi viewpoint. I think Ethereum has its uses and I don't think Balaji is a scammer (but I condemned his $1m bet).

In general I'm more optimistic. There's a lot of talk about scaling in the comments but Fedimint is not yet mentioned. But I think if Fedi will really be as great as they promised then it would be a major vector for Bitcoin adoption. And I don't have an absolute aversion to custodial solutions, after all, Liquid is also a federated custodial solution, but it looks fine to me.

I agree that the government attack is upcoming. Phoenix will probably the first to implement censorship since the company is in the EU and the routing is done on the company's hardware. I'm sure the gov will hunt down several fedimints too, once they exist. But I don't think we're losing? The more bullshit banks do, the more Bitcoin wins.