A Bitcoiner’s Manifesto

I Am A Bitcoin Fundamentalist.

Not to the dogmas of the Bitcoin “Maximalists”, the scriptures of the Satoshi “Visioners”, or the Web 3.0 ideologies of the “Multicoiners”. I am characterized by a markedly strict literalism of a fundamental concept: keep Bitcoin immutable.

Background.

Bitcoin has been described as unconfiscatable, borderless, censorship resistant, open, and permissionless. However, none of these properties are inherent to the code per se. Bitcoin exhibits these properties because it leverages humanity’s inability to reach consensus resulting in a Schelling point. This means the network’s participants may be sufficiently diverse and dispersed, such that they are absent communications from Bitcoin’s development and operational communities; therefore, they tend to default to the status-quo — which seems natural to them — and ultimately they do not deterministically upgrade their node implementation. This ensures immutability, and the lack of governance is one of maybe two or three fundamental factors that separates Bitcoin from the herd. (A clear second is the initial coin distribution scheme, which I will not discuss here.)

Where We Are Going.

Centralization may be the root of all evil. Over the course of human history, I have noticed a pattern: empires rise from the ground up, centralize, then fall in a blaze of glory that scorches the poor, the uninformed, and the elderly. Generally speaking, people mean well; however, as human systems eventually specialize to maximize gains — either in managing the masses more effectively or in capitalizing on profitable opportunities — those close to the center begin to take actions that benefit the entity, enterprise, or governance scheme to which they tend, over the people to which they serve. Bitcoin is the base layer of a new type of system, one which will be levered for different utilizations and one which produces a singular thing: Trust.

What We Need.

We need to keep Bitcoin immutable. At a fundamental level, this means we need to resist changes to the protocol. At a technical level, this means any change in a software implementation running the Bitcoin protocol must not violate an individual’s sovereignty by mandating an upgrade: Backwards-compatible soft forks are the only course to guarantee those running the protocol are not forced to take action and deterministically upgrade their node implementation. And finally, at a practical level, we need dedicated devices, with small and un-pooled mining chips — to further help keep the network decentralized, running immutable implementations of the Bitcoin protocol as well as the network’s additional mutable layers— to push even further, publicly demonstrating a Schelling point.

Thanks for reading, and happy 10th birthday bitcoin!