I wonder how many Bitcoiners have a good understanding of who holds the actual power and who sets the rules.
And this is a topic I'll have to write about but I already alluded to it in (
How Bitcoin's developers are attacking its Sovereign/Monetary use
Cheaper witness, friendlier data-paths, RBF normalization, relay policies favoring deep pockets, and node-operator liability drift tilt Bitcoin tow...
).
And namely, governance activations show who sets the rules.
Past upgrade processes (e.g., BIP9, BIP8, "Speedy Trial") revealed that miners and coordinated developers can accelerate or block changes faster than ordinary users can veto.
So power concentrates among aligned institutional actors.
Net effect:
- Technical ideals matter less than coordination leverage.
- Future upgrades will likely follow similar political dynamics.
1) What actually happens in upgrades:
- Rule changes need coordination. To activate, you need miners to mine the new rules, big pools to signal, exchanges/custodians to accept deposits, wallet/infrastructure teams to ship updates, and users to run them.
- BIP9/BIP8/“Speedy Trial” are coordination levers. They set thresholds and timers that, in practice, let miners + core devs + major infra decide when something flips on — or stalls.
2) Who really has leverage
- Miners/pools: Control signaling and block production. If they don't play ball, activation drags. If they coordinate, it can move very fast.
- Core maintainers & lead devs: Control what's merged, what binaries ship, and which activation method/warnings land in the "standard" client most people run.
- Exchanges/custodians/Payment-Service-Providers: Control where coins flow. If they choose a side, liquidity follows them. That decides practical reality more than forum votes.
- Ordinary users: Matter in aggregate, but only if they can withhold liquidity or hash in a coordinated way — which is rare.
3) Why this concentrates power
- Coordinating thousands of small users is hard; coordinating a few dozen institutions is easy.
- Activation schemes with time windows and thresholds reward actors who can move in lockstep (pools, large infra, top client maintainers).
- "User veto" exists in theory (run your own rules), but without miners and exchanges you're on a minority chain with no liquidity.
4) What this means in practice
- Technical purity loses to coordination. The "best" design doesn't win; the most coordinated coalition does.
- Messaging is part of the game. Activation method choices ("Speedy Trial", LOT=true/false, flag days) are politics encoded in software defaults.
- Future upgrades repeat the pattern. Expect negotiations between dev leads, pools, and big venues; users mostly ratify by upgrading after the fact.
5) Bitcoin's upgrades aren't decided by abstract ideals — they're decided by who can coordinate miners, code, and liquidity fastest. That's why power tends to cluster with aligned institutional actors, and why future changes will follow the same political playbook.
States would like to keep their monopoly on money issuance and aren't fond of permissionless money.
Bitcoin's survival and adoption, as censorship-resistant money, depend on whether its most committed users can detect, coordinate, and counter inevitable policy, market, and social attacks.
This is tough to do if you're oblivious to what's happening.
It doesn't help that Bitcoin mining is awfully centralized (
Bitcoin's mining centralization problem (Hashrate ≠ Freedom)
Hashrate ≠ freedom. Templates = freedom. Until miner-templating is common and censorship correlation breaks, rising hashrate is mostly optics.
).
The solution of course is a more vigilant community and more decentralization everywhere:
- miner-selected templates (DATUM/Stratum V2),
- more viable client implementations,
- privacy and self-custody defaults and better non-custodial payments UX,
- routing around perimeters (App-store independence, Cloud independence, ISP resilience, etc),
- routine, verifiable Proof-of-Reserves across custodians (anti-Paperization).
