The line is not some magical distinction between "good cryp…

The line is not some magical distinction between "good crypto" and "bad crypto." The line is governance.
Who controls it? Who can change it? Who makes the rules? Who benefits from those changes? Who owes duties to whom?
That is precisely where the problem begins.
BTC spent years claiming it had solved governance by pretending governance didn't exist. Then came developer groups, policy changes, blacklists, censorship debates, soft forks, gatekeepers, foundations, conferences, and an endless parade of people insisting nobody was in charge while behaving very much as though they were.
Oscar Wilde once observed that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. In crypto, the only thing worse than governance is pretending you don't have any.
The law does not care about slogans. It cares about control.
And every system has control somewhere.
The real question is not whether governance exists. It is who has it, how they exercise it, and whether they're honest enough to admit it.
That, rather inconveniently, is the very question BTC spent a decade trying not to answer.
Written by S. Tominaga