It’s hard to believe that it was only a year since a public arm of USG first rattled its wooden sabres at the mysterious cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. And what a year it has been!

Within this short period, humble beginnings of weekend tinkering and growing chatter rapidly gave way to lucrative IRL profit opportunities; and with them, a sleek new class of (somewhat) professional Bitcoin entrepreneurs. A preemptive political press was needed to secure peace of mind for the nouveau riche of this growing niche — and the ambitious upstarts who hoped to someday also fill it. Through gritted teeth, sweet nothings were floated in the state’s own briary tongue. We earned a temporary love fest. Psychological gates tenuously opened. Coked up on ASIC mining and sensationalism, the ecosystem’s resulting torrents of restless venture capital funding runneth over.

Sideshows abounded: Pirates were detained, Satoshis were harassed, Winklevii were unfortunately everywhere. Financial returns were sweet but vindication was often more delicious. Enmeshed in this real-time stream of laughs and outrages and shiny distractions, it was easier than you might think to lose track of the fact that the billion dollar economy being built was actually real. The riches were real, the losses were real. Latent enemies, whose hard-lobbied fortunes lay in the wake of this magic internet money’s creative destruction, became real. Their lawyers and their old college roommates in government were real. Suddenly, the cages that had in the past only toothlessly threatened ballsier renegades became all too real as well.

Charlie Shrem was one canary, Cameron and Tyler each (fittingly) comprised one half of the other. Opinions on this “coalmine question” diverge — which brings us to the present dilemma. With higher stakes and louder observers, the ragtag team of hackers, anarchists, capitalists, and evangelists that first brought Bitcoin to the masses must soon confront the central tension that was temporarily tabled in the face of a common cause: How should Bitcoin be?

Should Bitcoin primarily be a practical payment system, ideologically neutered and eager to please? The commercial wing of the community — the entrepreneurs, ideas men, venture capitalists, and weekend radicals of Wall Street — naturally concurs. Their appeals to rigid political realities, marketing concerns, and the high opportunity costs of pursuing more radically capitalistic methods of production serendipitously dovetail with their considerable profit opportunities. Universalists, too, prioritize the peer-to-peer promise that cheap global remittances and an unprecedented affordability of financial access can one day pay forward to the photogenic wards of their passion projects. Their visions are still grand but their imaginations remain anchored to the status quo.

Depending on how cynical we want to be, we can view the internal contradictions of the commercialist approach as a bug or a feature for the driving players. From one side of their mouths, they champion the truly exciting technological benefits that Bitcoin beckons: Low transactions costs, secured “instantaneous” transfers, and irreversibility for all! Never mind the infant technical sophistication practiced by most consumers; after all, that’s the value these third party services promise to provide. (Surely they’ll get it right?) For the low, low price of placing your trust in a third party service, any grandparent and lemonade peddler can become a pioneer of the digital currency revolution in a few easy steps.

How else to coax trust in your cryptocurrency-changing business? There’s always force. To pack a more powerful pitch, many call on the state to impose stronger regulations on their own industries. Intelligence agencies and financial bouncers are directed to purge the undesirables for the good of the biz. Trust in numbers circles back to trust in your good friends down at the Serious Regulatory Body — and those truly exciting technological benefits start to look a lot like the usual tricks from the bad old days.

“The irony of Bitcoin,” investor Hemant Taneja soothsays, is that “it will lead to greater government cooperation to regulate money.” The smart money, so to speak, will be positioned on the right side of this future.

True believer commercialists may myopically underrate or mentally divine justifying benefits from this surface state-enforced equilibrium, others appear to effectively straddle this difficult line. A few bad apples, no doubt, knowingly conceal conspiracies and contrivances in the current merriment and diversions. Either way, regulatory path dependencies will enrich political entrepreneurs, leaving consumers none the wiser. They won’t radically change the world as many once had dreamed, but they will have at least made a few bucks in the process.

Or can Bitcoin somehow keep it real, as early adopters and libertarians pray? Relative numbers dwindle, but the faithful of the Sanctuary of St. Satoshi still jealously guard its synthetic spirit. For what, they plead, will it profit the Bitcoin experiment to process payments for the whole world and forfeit its crypto-anarchist soul? Their values — hard money, privacy, decentralization, trustless transfer, permission-less exchange — are equal parts unfashionable and uncompromising. Their wills are resolute. Their members, eccentric. Their days are not quite numbered, but we feel which way the wind is blowing.

The early days were glory days. Bound by an uncommon optimism (or desperation) about technology’s promise to secure a freer future, the future philosophical wing of Bitcoin quietly grew on the relevant mailing lists and meetups years before the first genesis block was mined. Brilliant projects — Dai’s b-money, Back’s hashcash, Szabo’s Bit Gold — paved the way. News of a hard digital currency that overcame both the double-spending and Byzantine General’s problems came to these awe-struck enthusiasts as manna from a mysterious mastermind. Satoshi stole fire and entrusted it to the crypto-anarchists’ care. Their vows, in other words, are serious business.

Needless to say, crypto-anarchy does not easily scale. The Bitcoin protocol takes a particular mind to individually grok, small numbers in the early days necessarily shared these critical philosophical and technical foundations. As the community grew, lighter beards patiently explained the purpose and functions to newer waves of curious entrants, but the day came when there were simply not enough masters to go around. A solid core maintained enough influence by the time Bitcoin first entered the court of public opinion, but the tide of entryism eventually yielded its bundled paradox of benefits and costs. Yes, the larger community ushered in mass excitement, public awareness, beneficial network effects, and dramatic price appreciation. It also increased the number of available avenues for misinformation, opportunism, and unproductive investment — without an according increase of trusted shepherds to guide the trustless.

The problem has never been profits, per se. Both wings boast considerable numbers of dyed-in-the-wool capitalists, albeit diverging respectively in practice and in theory. This is not a simple story of hometown heroes and sour grapes. No, the tension has always rested in ideology. Cafeteria crypto-enthusiasts pick and choose Bitcoin’s most useful attributes to yield immediate benefits while abandoning or even denouncing the rest. The philosophical wing, on the other hand, sees the tools and ethos of the Bitcoin project as two halves of a sacred, inseparable whole. So far, tensions have remained largely surface or rhetorical. If pushed to the limit, future battles will move to Bitcoin Core — and the stakes will rise astronomically.

The good news is that cypherpunks write code. So long as trusted stewards retain influence at the helm, any potential damage will be contained above the block chain. Growing rhetorical pressures or state demands would only compound the difficulty of this delicate balancing act.

Perhaps the true irony of Bitcoin is the high amount of trust required to maintain either equilibrium: We must trust that the inner sanctum of the Bitcoin community will protect the protocol as intended, or, should they fail, we must ultimately return to trust in government-approved third party intermediaries to shuttle our gelded shekels. The Bitcoin community faces a fork. Where will you place your trust?