1/ Just "believing in bitcoin" doesn't put you on "the same team". Belief in a miner-driven, trustful, low fee, big block bitcoin, is totally at odds with the node-sovereign, trustless, high fee, resource-constrained bitcoin.
2/ If you feel unhappy that some former bitcoiners have been "excommunicated" (translation: criticised, muted, ignored!) for their different views, that's not because of tribalism, or faith, or religion. It's because their ideas suck.
3/ Their ideas suck, and if implemented on bitcoin the changes would damage bitcoin users' sovereignty and compromise trustlessness. The ideas themselves are contradictory to bitcoin and oppose its fundamental value propositions.
4/ Not all viewpoints are equal. Just like totalitarian socialists and voluntarist capitalists can never get along. There's no truth "in-between".
5/ Some theories are weak and/or broken. Some code is faulty. Intentions don't matter here. Nor does personality or dedication. It's all execution.
6/ This is what we mean by "attacks" on bitcoin. If the (sometimes well-meaning) people proposing big blocks or inflation or hard fork governance or miner democracy or onchain KYC got their way, then bitcoin would be compromised and quite quickly fail.
7/ Just because these people "believe in bitcoin" doesn't mean their ideas are not dangerous. Bitcoin must not fail. Hodlers would lose significant wealth, sure, but more importantly it will be very difficult to repeat a project with such historical importance.
8/ (That importance is not taking some nasty fees away from nasty banks, nor is it expanding banking services to the unbanked. It's completely ending the fractional reserve and central banking system, then holding it back for as long as we can. Big stakes.)
9/ Conversely, those that are the quickest to jump to accusations of tribalism, party lines, teams, cults, scriptures, dogma, religion, and faith are normally those most reliant on it.
10/ They believe bitcoin will succeed, *no matter what*, we just have to keep believing and working together.
11/ Being on the bitcoin/crypto anti-bank "team" was also fun in the early days on reddit and twitter with all the memes and stuff. Everyone was united.
12/ But later it was discovered that many were involved for different reasons, and some didn't even know why they were there or why bitcoin worked. They resented the conflict with people that were supposedly "on the same team". What happened to the "team spirit"?
13/ Then you have the whitepaperism, which relies on both subjective interpretations of foundational texts and an assumption that Satoshi (🙏) was omniscient.
14/ You won't find any so-called "maximalists" (read: bitcoiners) whining about tribalism or dogma. It's not constructive or informative. And they're quite content in their growing understanding of bitcoin.
15/ Instead the focus is on theory, technology, and economics - constructing a coherent ideology that explains bitcoin. This allows us to make effective predictions and take productive action.
16/ You only need to take s brief look at the recent history of the Andresens, Vers, Voorhees, Poons, Krawiszs, Deroses, Bitpays and Purses - those that complain about tribalism the loudest - to see a litany of outright wrong predictions and faulty proposals.
17/ (And a whole lot of failing shitcoins).
18/ If you're arguing over tribalism and dogma, you have no argument. Instead, take on the criticisms directly. Or improve your proposal until it makes sense.
19/ There is no team and there are no teams. There's only bitcoin. And you can either get with the programme or keep getting things wrong and fall into irrelevance.
