The whole Bitcoin development process is so broken that non-technical plebs with full-time jobs have to try to become technical to understand how badly they've been getting fucked by Bitcoin's developers.
The only way out is to at least define:
- what it is you're changing (freedom money, distributed, permissionless database, etc),
- what is changeable on layer 1 (if anything),
- in which cases are these things changeable.
The more you change the protocol for the worse, the less of an option not changing the protocol becomes because you have to change the changes.
It's kind of funny to see people comparing Bitcoin's L1 to TCP/IP. Have you seen the Releases tab of the default implementation on GitHub ( 
). These guys are shipping.
Development-Process Capture = Perimeter Control
You don't have to "hack" Bitcoin's consensus rules to influence how the network behaves.
You can steer what gets relayed, mined, or socially accepted by quietly shaping the development process — who gets funded, who reviews changes, which features become defaults, how releases are timed, and how communication is framed.
Most probably know this, but governments want to maintain monopoly on force + money issuance.
Fiat is the ultimate control layer -> no major government defects from this system.
So governments don't like Bitcoin (as MoE) very much.
If you expect for governments to come out and try to ban Bitcoin, don't because that's not how the system works.
Systems don't rely on bans; they use knobs — adjustable defaults, standards, and processes that subtly guide behavior.
The Bitcoin development process is a dense cluster of such knobs.
Open source ≠ immune
Control flows through funding, maintainers, policy defaults, and release cadence.
There are probably less than a 100 people in the world who have game theory studied:
- the development process control surfaces — where steering actually happens
- what capture looks like
- how capture changes outcomes
- why the development process is the preferred perimeter to attack
I'll just go over the last one because it is quite short.
Why the development process is the preferred perimeter to attack:
- Cheaper than legislation: Defaults and "safety" framing do the enforcement work.
- Plausible deniability: "We're just improving performance".
- Asymmetric impact: hits sovereign users hardest; institutional wrappers unaffected.
If you require people to be technical for them to be able to protect their savings, this project fails.
From the outside looking in, this project is starting to look more and more like Ethereum.
Developers are gonna wanna develop and if they are allowed, they'll develop Bitcoin into a centralized shitcoin.
GitHub
Releases · bitcoin/bitcoin
Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree. Contribute to bitcoin/bitcoin development by creating an account on GitHub.
It was left on Bitcoin Mechanic's last YT video.
Can we still laugh at gold bugs? It has become very difficult to.
