First of all, this discussion doesn't matter, Bitcoin will never regain the popularity it could have had if it had increased the block size back in 2017 when it became unusable, I remember buying stuff with Bitcoin, I remember mining and using that money to buy games on steam, paying for my electricity bill, etc, those days are gone and won't come back. After all of the backlash Valve got from the unusability of Bitcoin, they'll never reenable that, Bitcoin fucked all of crypto adoption back then and I don't think the market will ever forget (if they would they would have migrated to another coin already).

$1 which is what you say you pay is too much. Imagine if every time you used your card $1 extra was charged, you would never use that as a currency. The problem is that you're not thinking on Bitcoin as a currency, and I don't blame you, that hasn't been the vision for Bitcoin in a long while, but originally that was the goal.

You keep saying that BCH is an attempt at centralization, would you care to explain how that would work? Imagine if back when BCH hard fork happened all of the miners had sided with it (they had the option and choose not to), how would that be more centralized? You do know you can mine BCH with any miner, right? Just like BTC you don't need to use Bitcoin-core, the protocol is open source and there are plenty of implementations.

As for the botting attacks I was there when they supposedly happened, I was banned from /r/Bitcoin for saying the same thing I'm telling you now, we weren't bots, that was the excuse the mods there used to ban everyone who disagreed with keeping blocks small. I'm not going to put my hand in the fire for him, I don't know the guy and for all I care he can go fuck himself, but not everyone who was accused of being a bot was one, lots of us were just people saying "don't you see how not increasing the block is harming Bitcoin? Don't you see the hardware price has decreased dramatically since the 1MB block size was introduced? Don't you see companies are jumping ship and we are losing all of the momentum?" It sounds like bots because lots of people were pointing out the same stuff, but the thing is that we were pointing out things like we were seeing them in the real world. That's when /r/BTC started gaining popularity, because being banned from /r/Bitcoin was almost a rite of passage, and curiously on /r/BTC no one was banned for showing either side of the opinion, people might get downvoted but that's just the system working, banning people is censorship and it's a clear cut way of showing you've ran out of arguments and are just looking to create a bubble where everyone agrees with you.

Nope, the time is gone. Hard forks are not risky at all, Bitcoin has had several in the past, no one made a fuzz about them back then. Soft forks are just as dangerous, and BTC has had several. The difference between a soft and a hard fork is that the hard fork is backwards compatible, whereas the soft fork is forward compatible, both of them the miners are forced to migrate or they will be throwing away money.

You are correct, there is no demand or usage for either of the Bitcoin's anymore z there was back then, there isn't now. BCH is scaled much, much higher than BTC, so if adoption had migrated they would have been prepared. And the important thing is that no one was saying we don't need side chains, it was more of "we need the main chain to be usable NOW, we can scale indefinitely later, but we need to fix this NOW or Bitcoin adoption will be irreparably gone", unfortunately it was too little too late, and companies had already jumped ship and weren't going to risk it back.