Some really good replies to this and I recommend looking over the replies, but here is one that stands out:
I think you are missing what is really happening here. The cypherpunks who designed bitcoin did so realizing that it would always be attacked.
Enormous engineering effort has gone into making the bitcoin network resilient to attack. We encourage people to run their own nodes. This, by itself, prevented the corporate attack of big blockers. We make sure that nodes can still run over TOR. We have the ability to download the blockchain from satellites.
We fight hard to keep the blocksize down so that we can maintain decentralization and keep bandwidth requirements low.
Our reaction is more akin to the squirrel who saved up his nuts for winter shaking his head at those who never bothered to prepare.
Bitcoiners always expect attacks and always prepare for them.
Meanwhile, most of these alt-coins do not have a cypherpunk ethos. They are highly centralized. They hard-fork on a constant basis. Nodes run on AWS and blockchains are so large no one fully validates them. They have centralized authority figures, foundations, corporations, and even marketing departments.
We spent a decade telling people they needed to think defensively and they all laughed at us, confident in their technical superiority.
This moment is a giant "I told you so". If the SEC declares bitcoin a security or the US government declares it illegal, bitcoiners won't care.
We will treat that as just another attack to overcome. Maybe we all just move to El Salvador.
Or we build a mesh network to route traffic.
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