Their business plans are ruined if Bitcoin fees get too high. Note that 'extremely low fees' was the original selling point of Bitcoin which now has been ruined. So they were simply defending their businesses.
"The current launch plan includes launching on Ethereum chain, which will require paying ETH to obtain MTN tokens"
20% pre-mine
price starts at 1.67 ETH per MTN token
Remember Tezos? That raised a quarter of a billion dollars. There is way more money in making an ICO and saying "Bitcoin is broken! You need [new coin]!"
Brian makes money when you convert USD/BTC/ETH into USD/BTC/ETH. They announced they are adding more coins soon.
The main "2x" supporter runs "Grayscale Ethereum Classic Investment Trust" and tries to sell investors on a coin that nobody has ever used for anything ever.
The people who are "all in" on Bitcoin (the developers for example) think the "2x" fork is a terrible terrible idea. The people who are heavily invested in other coins want the "2x" fork to happen.
It's also hard to tell if Bitcoin developers are all in or not. Note that developers can have different interests than holders (eg. The want to get control of the codebase in order to get status and recognition & hopefully future consulting contracts). Note that the current bitcoin devs are mostly a new generation that got later in the game. Source & analysis about this point here http://hackingdistributed.com/2017/08/26/whos-your-crypto-bu...
this is 100% false, see this post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/72lwzv/if_bitcoin_...
You might notice that the table (conveniently) starts from 2010, after a good chunk of coins already has been mined. 2011-2012 is when a lot of the new devs came in which is the new generation, but it was getting much more difficult to mine then.
There's also so many problems with git commit history, so let's be honest here, ie. How many commits doesn't tell the whole story.
Hey, btw, my comments are just observations & not meant to criticize, sorry if you think I'm attacking you. I'm pretty positive about bitcoin and I think it's good that it can re-invent itself and find a good niche (the b2b / institutional market could be huge and certainly would see Bitcoin really growing up). The direction that the current team has chosen to lead it to has certainly paid off well. I sincerely wish the project more success in the future!