Bitcoiners built five principles into their culture. Then they voted for an upgrade that violates all five.

1. Don't trust, verify. You run a full node because you want to verify every rule yourself. But with Taproot's key-path spend, your node sees a valid signature and accepts the spend — while remaining blind to the hidden MAST tree that was committed off-chain. Your full node became a partial validator for a growing share of the money supply. You are now trusting algebra instead of verifying the complete contract.
2. Sound money requires a complete audit trail. You obsess over the 21M cap because money must be fully accountable. But Taproot introduces state inflation: real spending rules exist off-chain that the ledger cannot enumerate. The audit trail has gaps.
3. The blockchain is the truth. You believe the chain is the complete, incorruptible record. Taproot splits the record. You have the history, but for an increasing share of coins, you do not have the full rule set. The chain became a receipt with blacked-out line items.
4. Bitcoin fixes fiat. You mock fiat because the public cannot audit the central bank's full balance sheet. But Taproot imported the same opacity. Bitcoin went from fully transparent accounting to fractional-reserve accounting for state-space.
5. Censorship resistance. You demand that every obligation be visible so power cannot hide its debts. Taproot creates unverifiable debt: MAST trees encode real alternative futures that were thermodynamically committed, then silently erased from the record when the key path is taken.

The community defended these principles against bankers, governments, and shitcoiners. Then they accepted an upgrade that breaks every single one — and called it progress.