>I won't address the attacks on Roger Ver because it is my belief that attempts at turning a technical debate into politics should be met with contempt.
I mean, you just did, via this comment.
The BCH camp could have contributed their resources to helping Core come up with a long term solution. Any fork that doesn't offer real groundbreaking advances is just a distraction and should be shunned. Forks that are simple recompilations of the original Bitcoin with simple config changes to the blocksize and/or algo are power/greed plays.
While I think BCH is run by a bunch of nutjobs who are hellbent on doing unethical trash to ruin BTC, this isn't a fair criticism. Ver and others did try to help Bitcoin (I refuse to call it Core, it doesn't need a descriptor, Bcash does) through these methods, but BTC's developer pool is... something of a bunch of Internet arguers.
Roger Ver took his ball and went home. There's nothing wrong with that at all. He thinks he's right, and that's all well and good. What's not right is his ridiculous insistence that BCH is the real Bitcoin and the intentional methods to devalue BTC in conjunction with Jihan, and acting like a kid in public and social media going nuts.
Because it's a 99% pure fork of BTC, sure. Closer than the "original" Bitcoin? That's not possible to say.
>>philosophy
Subjective at best. Unless, you know, Craig Wright actually is Satoshi, since he's involved in BCH and has claimed to be him. In which case, it absolutely is.
>>community
Also subjective.
With that said, this certainly does not imply that p2p cash is what Bitcoin could actually excel at once it reach global scale. Modifying the original vision is not some great sin, it literally happens all the time with startups and no one bats an eye.
I don't think being closer to Satoshi's original vision is any important, Bitcoin is not a religion and Satoshi isn't a prophet.
The split-up was a good thing, I'm excited that different avenues are being explored. Maybe core maintainers are wrong and p2p cash is actually the way to go. Maybe Bitcoin Cash fans are wrong and the solution lies in developing L2 solutions. Maybe both are wrong. Time will tell and we should be happy that different things are being tried.
The engineer in me says that the "real" Bitcoin is the one with the most total difficulty. I think that definition is too narrow. To me, both are the real Bitcoin, just in different timelines. The timeline that wins will overwrite reality such that it was the real Bitcoin all along. Meta!