There is no center of power, no single source; Power is disseminated, it is exercised in a network and, in it, individuals not only circulate, but are always in a position to suffer it and also to exercise it. They are never the inert or conscious target of power, they are always its replacements.”
Michel Foucault
Bitcoin has no leader. It has no owners or presidents. There is no figure elected democratically (Luckily!) or by authoritarian imposition who decides on the course that should be followed or who is in charge of produce the truth about what we collectively define as Bitcoin.
“The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its life,” stated Satoshi Nakamoto in June 2010.
This “set in stone,” while referring to the technical foundations—the p2p network, proof of work, mining difficulty, etc.—also has a human element. For Bitcoin to be Bitcoin, that is, a digital cash system between equalsSatoshi had to disappear. Also It is by design that in Bitcoin there is no leader. Satoshi decapitated any potential ringleaders for the functioning of bitcoin.
However, the horizontality in Bitcoin, its headless character, does not come without side effects. That there is not a κυβερνήτης —which is where the word governor comes from, but which originally refers to the ship’s helmsman—does not mean that there are no crew members willing to step forward and occupy that empty space, not necessarily vacant, in front of the helm.
Because, as Michel Foucault says, “power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the acquired or preserved privilege of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions.”
Historically in Bitcoin there have been various dominant classesnot necessarily with effective power to modify the essence of Bitcoin, but to whom we have granted the authority to, with their speech, be true producers. Exchanges, miners, treasurers, developers, companies, influencers.
Although its capabilities are limited to make changes at the protocol level, at least arbitrarily, They do exert influence on the social layer of Bitcoin. And this matters because Bitcoin, in addition to software, is a human institution.
While ultimately it is the users who run nodes and who protect the consensus rules who have the final say on what client implementation or version of the code they run (in other words, the market), when it comes to forming their opinion and making their decisions, if they are not initiated into technical knowledge that allows them to understand the developers’ debates for themselves, their positions run the risk of being driven more by passion than by reason.
Inevitably, the gregarious nature of society sometimes means that those who voice the most extreme and polarizing speeches be admired by those in need of leaderswith the need to continue. Above all, in Bitcoin, where a cult of toxicity and extremism has been created. Hence, personalisms and messianic complexes emerge in an environment where, basically, there are no stratifications or verticality.
Comments like that of Luke Dashjr, in which he attributes an imaginary role in which “he has to save Bitcoin every few years” and that “Bitcoin cannot survive if it depends on one man”, overstate his role in Bitcoin.
Yes, he has been a developer with valuable contributions: he is the 15th contributor to Bitcoin Core with more than 541 commits; for years it has carried the only implementation other than Bitcoin Core that remains relevant today; and, among other things, has promoted decentralized mining with Eligius and OCEAN pool.
But he has also tried on other occasions impose your vision of Bitcoin on othersas in 2014, when it forced a modification to the Bitcoind client against the will of the developers to block betting pages like SatoshiDice.
Bitcoin is not close to depending “on one man.” In any case, what has depended on one man is his Bitcoin Knots implementation, which is incomparable to the robust work of hundreds of people on a peer-reviewed and validated system such as Bitcoin Core.
Regardless of whether Dashjr is right or wrong about the changes in OP_RETURN (at CriptoNoticias we believe that the debate has reinforced decentralization), to a large extent it has been his extreme positions that have gained him the most followers. That presents the situation as an attack by Bitcoin Core, from the order of the discourse it poses an antagonistic relationship, of friend-enemy, where The good will of the adversary is not recognized, but rather it is assumed as an existential affront.
We know with Foucault that “discourse is not simply what translates struggles or systems of domination, but rather what and through which we fight, what we fight for.” In this sense, Dashjr’s speech is promoting producing a certain kind of truth among his followers, for which they are willing to fight the way they fight in cryptocurrency networks: with the threat of a hard fork.
This opens cracks in the Bitcoiner “social fabric”, fostering divisions like the one promoted by Roger Ver at the time with Bitcoin Cash. All in all, that experience taught us that these cracks are not harmful in themselves. Rather, they are normal in adversarial, headless environments like Bitcoin, and the market knows how to metabolize them. So much so, that it seems that Ver himself has given in to the market’s decision, since the website he owns Bitcoin.comwhich previously spread propagandistic disinformation in favor of Bitcoin Cash, today recognizes Bitcoin as the real one, and Bitcoin Cash as another copy.
The real lesson behind the so-called block size wars and OP_RETURN wars is this: the lack of a helmsman in Bitcoin, while a feature and not a bug, has the side effect of sporadic appearance of personalisms that produce crises about what we consensually, at the social layer, decide that Bitcoin should be.
These crises are bound to repeat themselves from time to time. And as Bitcoin grows and more megalomaniacal actors begin to participate in the game, there will be deeper and deeper crises about what Bitcoin “should be” and how “we should” use it and why not.
This, yes, alerts us about the coming crises with which we potentially face we will face after the entry on the board of BlackRock, Strategy, United Statesand other actors in the inherited world who are accustomed to centralized decision-making models, and they are the ones who are in that center of power and production of truth.
Crises over whether or not Bitcoin should implement privacy features, over whether there should be native KYC on the network, over third-party custody or self-custody, are potential crises that we must prepare for.
This is what several self-invested leaders in Bitcoin have attempted, to usurp a position that does not exist, forcing visions contrary to the direction that the market is choosing, believing themselves to be morally superior enough to save to Bitcoin trying to impose its vision.
But, by design, it is impossible. Because, by design, Bitcoin rejects leaders. Because Satoshi decapitated them from the system. Modifying this quality would make Bitcoin stop being Bitcoin, since you lose decentralization, freedom and openness. In Bitcoin there can be no leaders because this would mean the failure of the system.