I would say it's a given fact that bitcoin is growing as an ecosystem and whether we want it or not, some people and ideas that we don't agree with will join in. I think it's our role as people who have figured out the benefits of bitcoin before others to try and protect the core principles on which it stands. But the community will change, and most likely for the worse every now and then, look at the recent ETF thing, but we have to accept and work around it. Bitcoin won't change, it's still the same public infrastructure for everyone even if we agree with the or not.

Touching on the populism idea, I personally think that in order to steer out of the bad direction we're heading to as a mainstream society, a lot of people need to awaken to the fact that they can/do have control and agency over their lives and not everything is in vain - if we put our minds and hearts together for a greater cause, there is hope that we can move the needle just enough to avoid the over-arching totalitarian world government to which we're heading to.

The core of my optimism around the opportunity for a "new" system lies in the fact that if we center it around technology and un-forgeable code, we remove a lot of direct human intervention from the equation, which has more or less always been the root cause of the monster creeping up.