I think Bitcoin really feels empowering in a sense.

Some bitcoin users see the hard fork as in some ways violating their most fundamental values. I personally think these fundamental values, pushed to such extremes, are silly.

I think people don't realise that running a piece of code that verifies some conditions for a financial transaction, that by itself is a lot less work than verifying a cryptographic signature, and so even if the virtual machine is inefficient, the cryptographic signature is still going to dominate.

I remember knowing, for a while, for a long time, that I was kind of abnormal in some sense.

Bitcoin is great as a form of digital money, but its scripting language is too weak for any kind of serious advanced applications to be built on top.

There is definitely a lot of banks that are interested in private blockchains. In some cases, they are happy with public blockchains as well. The opposition to just doing things on a public blockchain is definitely smaller than some of the strongest detractors think.