I think you're reading too much into it. It's clickbait.

No the factions in the world of BTC have been very contentious for a long time now. It may be hyperbole but not by much.

> for Bloomberg to use a 'civil war' hyperbole signals fear from the establishment. Established capital more specifically.

That may or may not be true, but it's definitely a non sequitur narrative. In this situation, it doesn't matter whether or not "the establishment" is fearful of Bitcoin. All that will ultimately matter is whether or not the "winners" of this debacle end up killing Bitcoin in the process, and that will necessarily play out in terms of markets.

>And really, that is bitcoin's biggest threat.

Only if it survives long enough to truly compete at the level of "established capital".

I wouldn't call a technical decision that threatens the monetary value of bitcoin a mere "internal struggle". If this can happen once, what's to prevent it from happening again over some other issue? How can anybody have confidence they'll be able to spend Bitcoins in the same way they do now?

We see this over and over again with OSS projects. That's actually kinda the point. If this split is allowed to happen, I assume that it will happen again because it's being treated as and OSS project (which it is) and not a currency (which it sort of is).

People refer to "holy wars" for such silly things as tabs vs spaces. In that light, "civil war" seems like pretty much what this is.

Uhhh, a civil war is exactly how Id describe it.

People are talking about doing a freaking proof of work change, so I'm not sure how much more nuclear you can get.

If they really didn't see anything in it (be it profit or wanting to get to market "first"), then there wouldn't be so many large firms investing in their own blockchain tech.

It's called hedging bets. That's how you become an established player.

You hire 50k people and throw 5/10 at block chain just to make sure you don't get caught with your pants down. That's barely an investment.

They will acquihire when the time is right. They have absolutely no need to do any in-house tech whatsoever.

Permissioned blockchains contain almost none of the interesting properties of a public, untrusted-node blockchain, and function mostly as a signed-transaction append-only database.

Investment (in blockchain tech) by major players does not (in and of itself) prove that they feel threatened by Bitcoin. Blockchain tech can have utility to those players outside of Bitcoin.