There aren’t enough nodes…I always felt good since I thought nodes decide.
They decide what they want to update and download and what not….
….turns out, the nodes are very passive, complacent, naive and also susceptible to a Sybil attack. Especially due to the low number. V30 only needs to spawn up couple of tausend nodes.
IMHO, it’s also not about the severity of the change, it’s that the development process is the preferred perimeter to attack (and I’m repeating someone else’s thoughts here):
- 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.
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.
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
…it’s the only thing that can kill Bitcoin. Do now what? BIP444. Hard fork? Not good for adoption. Not good for THE monetary network of humanity.
