This is why I agree with Mike Hearn that the "Bitcoin experiment has failed"[0]. In fact it already did so in late 2015.
He makes technical arguments there which you could debate (some of his technical arguments have been shown to be misleading[1]).
But I think where he hits the nail on the head is that Bitcoin is now simply a circus. Unless the community can be united again, it won't last.
The Reddit censorship, DoS attacks, "scaling" conferences where solutions are not allowed to be proposed. It's childish, and almost shocking that people have stood behind their ridiculous behavior for so long, when they are on the verge of changing the world economy.
[0] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...
No particularly special Bitcoin knowledge is required to figure out why, just careful study of that post with a critical and analytical mind (and not the mind of a "fan"). I wasted far too much of my life dealing with people Peter Todd had deliberately confused back in those years - it's a Sisyphean task that simply never ends if you let it - so I don't wish to write out a long rebuttal now, especially as I don't know you. But see if you can figure it out. Like I said, you don't need me to explain if you study things carefully.
As I said to Peter Todd in that thread, I'm a neutral observer and a fan of both of yours. Having been a programmer for over a decade, it's a shame that even someone like me can get so lost in the rhetoric of this debate.
Thanks for all your blog posts, I point people to them all the time. My greatest wish (something I tried to communicate to Peter Todd) is that Core would write some thoughtful, clear, well-argued posts like yours.
But I suppose it doesn't matter, because as we both agree, the experiment has already failed.
During that crisis it got quite ugly though. Maybe it could be argued Bitcoin is going through a much larger, multi-year ugly period, and that things will settle down and cooperation will happen in another couple years. But many of the people claiming leadership and some of the core developers are outright toxic, and that 'trickles down' into the community.
The recent multi-sig wallet hack was due to some bad refactoring by one of the developers on the Parity node/wallet team. Gavin Wood wrote a post about it, and instead of blaming his employee, he blamed himself, that he didn't put enough security into the Solidity language itself. And then he proposed some changes to make it safer.
There definitely was some ugliness with the ETH/ETC fork and controversies, but now we have pull requests from ETC developers that help improve ETH.
There seems to be a lot less ego in the Ethereum developer community. The fighting inside the Bitcoin community leads to attacking other communities too. Whenever there is a setback or hack or just the Ether price drops a bit, the threads are full of Bitcoiners coming in to laugh, attack, 'concern troll'. But you rarely see the reverse. Usually the attacks on Bitcoin come from the people who think all cryptocurrencies are a scam, they target everyone equally. Of course there are exceptions, there are amazing people in Bitcoin and horrible people in Ethereum. I'm just making a broad generalization on the feeling someone gets when reading and talking in their communities.
It's no wonder that Ethereum has the largest developer interest, it's just a really nice place to work.