I'm going to answer your question truthfully, even though it may not be the answer you want to hear. I think you want the honest truth.

I've seen the multitude of threads you've written about me across the years—I understand it is frustrating to see that this many years after the blocksize wars, even though it is clear as day that all the curtains have fallen for me, and that all the rose-tint shade has slipped out of my eyes, yet I'm still not able to give the Bitcoin Cash community the nod you're looking for:

_You were right all along. The small-blockers were the bad guys. Their technological vision is hampered, Layer 2 scaling leads to too much complexity, Blockstream stakeholders are still to this day trying to steer crucial, possibly sticky economic activity into their corporate sidechain silo. _

Why is it like this then? Why is that so hard to say?

As much as you may like to believe it, it wouldn't be particularly hard for me to admit the above if I truly believed it to be the case. Now I'll instead tell you how I actually feel.

First, some background context: during the blocksize wars, I spent almost all of my time in Stockholm with the local Bitcoin community. My two best friends in the community were Tommy and Hampus.

Tommy was a bcasher. Hampus was a small-blocker. Tommy was a /r/bch forum moderator, who was such a persistent warrior for his cause that Gregory Maxwell once talked about getting a restraining order against him. Hampus was a Bitcoin Core sycophant, as I think many of us were at the time.

One of my longer and most regretted unwritten blog posts was a comparison between the steelman-cases for both sides of BCH vs BTC argument, profiling both Tommy and Hampus as excellent case studies.

The reason that they were such good examples for me was that I knew both of them quite closely, I trusted their motivations very deeply. Without going too much into details about each of these individuals, I can wholeheartedly say that there's not a bone in Tommy's body that's malevolent or hellbent on trying to turn Bitcoin for the worse.

All his arguments for Bitcoin Cash were truly because he believed that the best path for Bitcoin forward was a simple blocksize increase. And he was possibly the most diehard, longest-tenured Bitcoin fan that I knew. I didn't know anyone who was so single-focused on Bitcoin (a benefit of his neurodivergence). Tommy was no fool either, he had been right about future trends with very high precision in the critical cases that mattered. And now, in the fullness of time, when all is said and done, I think back then, during the blocksize wars, Tommy was right about many more things than I was willing to give him credit for at the time.

One of the products of our friendship came in the form of a chart which plotted what would happen in all edge case scenarios during the BCH <> BTC <> SegWit2x splits during the BIP91 lock-in/activations. I felt uniquely positioned at the time to distill the different outcomes because Tommy had so much knowledge on the big-blocker side of things, and Hampus was so deeply knowledgeable about the small-blocker side of things. We sat together in multiple cafés and pizza huts until we had the final outline on paper.

After a few nitpicks by Gregory Maxwell, the chart was complete.

I sat many times with Tommy and challenged his perspective on why Bitcoin should scale via increasing the blocksize alone. What happens after that demand is gobbled up, and the fees go up again? "We increase it again", Tommy would say. It was clear to me that at the time, many big-blockers weren't content with stopping the increase of the blocksize limits beyond what a normal person, or even a well-resourced person could sync on their computer. At some instances, Tommy would say that Bitcoin would still be secure even if something like 20 geographically distributed full nodes / miners were the only entities with the full record of the blockchain.

Tommy believed that ultimately the economic incentives of the largest stakeholders of the network would be too strong for it to become corrupted, and that there would always be someone trusted enough to provide users with the hash of the most recent chaintip to fork away from if the rules of the network ever became seriously endangered. And if such a thing were to happen, he believed economic forces such as the ones we've seen with fork futures in the Bitcoin Unlimited case would be the real arbiter of consensus, not people wearing hats and running fully synchronized full nodes.

I'd actually be ashamed at the time to admit how many valid points Tommy made then (mind you I am trying to represent his argument from memory as far as I'm capable, I am fully aware that he may feel like I'm misrepresenting his stance completely). It's only in later years that I've actually started to take the devil's advocate's side and argue similar to Tommy, that the war of consensus takes places on markets and in pricing, and even at very high blocksizes, the real-world mechanics that we use to help us navigate which fork we're buying and selling still work in practice, in the same way that the "weak subjectivity" problem in Proof-of-Stake is ultimately a problem we can practically solve.

At the time, I told Tommy that the system he's looking for is EOS, not Bitcoin.

This is getting a very long-winded answer, but I'll try to circle back to your questions in a moment. What I believe, and still believe to this day, is that what Tommy proposed was a riskier path. Not only would it force Bitcoin into a weird state where it's secured by a type of game theory that really only very few people would entertain as being sufficient, it would also force a lot of good people out of Bitcoin that I believed then, and do believe to this day, were the most technically capable people in Bitcoin, and made the choices they did out of genuine caution rather than malice.

The "evil cabals" that people always ascribe as the explanation behind things, I simply don't believe in those stories. Sure, some Blockstream stakeholders are economically motivated. It is completely reasonable that some have had their thinking perverted by this. But the Blockstream stakeholder trying to lure everyone into Liquid to siphon fees indefinitely from the new economic world order is a strawman of the small-blocker side. It completely misses the genuine individuals, like Hampus, who really simply weren't ready to let go of self-sovereign node-running at home until we had atleast tried Layer 2 scaling.

And you see exactly the same kind of nonsense stories being told by Bitcoin maximalists about me and Udi Wertheimer, right? That we're funded by the Chinese government to spam the Bitcoin network? It's either the jews or the Chinese, whoever you're the most afraid of. I know that I'm a half-Swedish half-Iranian European and I am way too lazy to care about what the Chinese government wants me to do. I vehemently reject such simple, banal explanations for why people act the way they act, because I've seen this bogus rhetoric go wrong about myself as long as I've been a public face on the Internet.

The layer 2 path of Lightning, was atleast on paper, back then, to even many bright folks, something we thought we could get into a workable condition. We haven't by now, and we've failed, but that doesn't mean it was a perverted decision. It is interesting to me that even folks like Andreas Antonopoulos still cling on to this vision of scaling Bitcoin. Most of the people in my intellectual circle have at this point admitted that Lightning is a dead end in its current state. Some now argue that it's only a few new opcode softforks away before all the kinks are worked out, while I believe that channel-based scaling must be burnt down to the ground altogether. Some believe that it's not Lightning, but now "Ark" which is a descendant from Lightning, which will usher the future of hyperbitcoinization.

I still see what I have always seen—a disorganized soup of people with a great variety of ideas trying to bring this decentralized currency forward, most with good intentions.

1. What evidence or change (w/c)ould cause you to abandon BTC & migrate yourself + Wizards to BCH?

Let's first talk about this at the social level. The answer to this question is never.

Even though Bitcoin Cash community had some valid ideas, many correct criticisms, and its origins stems from many of the longest-tenured original fanbase, Bitcoin Cash is not the second-most interesting project in cryptocurrency to me, nor the third, nor the fifth, maybe perhaps even not the twelfth.

I think where our disconnect is that it doesn't logically follow for me that simply because the Lightning Network did not work out, I'd be interested in rewinding the clock half a decade and continue on some other fork of Bitcoin. While I don't have a very rosy picture of the Bitcoin maximalists who have stuck their head in their sand for far too many years as it became more and more clear that the UX challenges of Lightning were steering users into custodial wallets, I actually don't hold bcashers in very high esteem either.

In order for you to understand this, try to picture it from my point of view. The Bitcoin Cash community. at large, were a group of people who had some reasonable qualms about Lightning, but moments later got duped into believing that a con artist, Craig Wright, was the inventor of Bitcoin. I want you to look at these pictures below and refresh your memory.

The Calvin Ayre Hong Kong cruise (with Craig Wright, Roger Ver and Deadalnix) (archive link)

While it's true that after some time, some people in the Bitcoin Cash community finally rejected Craig Wright, the fact that so many of people from the BCH-inner circle so rapidly got themselves ensnared into Calvin Ayre's dungeon of thieves and snakes, has caused irrevocable distrust for me in those people's judgement. It is not a community I am seeking to rejoin, nor a chain I am looking to extend.

Now let's talk about it at a technical level. The only point where I'd become interested enough to join the Bitcoin Cash community is if the community successfully became stewards and leaders in the type of technologies that I believe will ultimately scale blockchains.

If I am to accept that Bitcoin's vision of scaling through Lightning is a dead end (which I've done), my first course of action is try to correct it. This is what we're doing with our softfork movement efforts at Taproot Wizards. I think we've been making great progress in changing the culture of Bitcoin, by introducing new users into Bitcoin, with completely different perspectives compared to the Bitcoin maximalists who refuse to observe the certain aspects of reality that's frustrating to me. And what's even better, is that our activity on the chain is causing many of those Lightning fanatics to revisit their understanding of the Lightning Network! Read this excellent piece by @benthecarman.

If those efforts fail, my next course of action is to choose a different cryptocurrency project to be a part of. For me, right now, that would be the Ethereum community or the modular/ZK communities. There are several efforts in crypto right now where the unviability of channel-based systems for scaling are well-understood and other directions are chosen, which I believe do carry the potential of achieving the goals of scalability and decentralization at once (yes, fraud proofs, validity/ZK proofs and data availability sampling are central elements to achieve this).

2. Why are BCH moderate blocksize increases non-viable &/or mutually exclusive w/ improved L2s (eg rollups)?

They're absolutely not. You can start building ZK-technology and data availability sampling on Bitcoin Cash today. The fact of the situation though is that the intellectual mindshare in stewarding those type of technologies are nowhere near Bitcoin Cash, nor have they any interest in being a part of the Bitcoin Cash project effort.

Let me turn the question around, why should there be an effort to build these types of technologies on Bitcoin Cash today, among the people who understand those technologies? What do these technologists owe the Bitcoin Cash community? If your answer is "well because Bitcoin Cash retains much of the UTXO set of Bitcoin and bcashers were right to fork off from BTC because of the overfocus on Lightning", well, I disagree. The UTXO set of Bitcoin, the real BItcoin for which there are ETFs and other things now, is the right destination for these technologies, not the resulting fork of an ancient dispute.

Applying these technologies to a current fork of Bitcoin at its current blockheight would be a more interesting choice for me if it came to that point. There's nothing from the current Bitcoin Cash ecosystem that I want or need buy-in from to develop a better system for the future, and its closest-knit community of Bitcoin Cash doesn't have a very strong grasp of the technological future of blockchain I'm interested in.

You either have it (Bitcoin does) or get it (the modular/ZK community does), Bitcoin Cash neither has it nor gets it.

3. If you were running The BCH Podcast, what would your promotional strategy be?

I would rebrand it to focus on a type of technology. "We're going to make the blocks as big as they have to be, and then also kinda use whatever other technologies are around to scale further I guess?" is not a compelling message.

Like I said, you either have it (Bitcoin, Ethereum) or you get it (<insert technological scaling narrative here>), you either talk about a community/currency that's big and existing, or about a compelling technological vision that's so compelling that others will buy into that vision and are willing to make an off-chance bet that your very different technological vision is so revolutionary that everything else will ultimately have to succumb to it.

Right now, Bitcoin Cash is playing not second, not third, not fifth, and maybe perhaps not even twelfth flute to other compelling underdog narratives out there, and that's why I wouldn't run a podcast focused on trying to propagate its message. Its message is too worn out, its brand is too diluted, it is simply not fertile—it doesn't swim. You're not the biggest, and you're not flashy. You're old, sunken, and salty. It is time to end it.

....So what happened to Tommy? Tommy left Bitcoin for good. He did not feel that his vision got a foothold in the market, and that humans were too easily misguided by clowns like Craig Wright that he lost faith in decentralized currency projects altogether. Tommy is interested in other technology trends now. There's probably some wisdom in Tommy's decisions, the big fat old autist that he is.