For a long time, a misconception has been peddled – and widely accepted – that Bitcoin cannot be corrupted or changed, and this is completely false.
Bitcoin is software, and all software can be altered, as has happened with op_return.
And the consensus that some people talk about so much, whether out of bad faith or ignorance, does not exist as such.
You cannot have consensus with just a single reference implementation. Consensus exists on the BitTorrent network, with hundreds of clients using their own implementation of the protocol and just as many libraries doing the same. Consensus once existed on the eDonkey network, where there were also hundreds of clients. But in Bitcoin, consensus is very weak, and the CIA is delighted by this.
Corrupt Core, and you corrupt everything.
Gold and Bitcoin punish government incompetence; for their price to rise, all you have to do is sit back and wait for the government to mismanage the money stolen from taxpayers.
Bitcoin has many advantages over gold, but it has one major disadvantage: its logical nature is not underpinned by physics, but by humans. Humans cannot change the physics of gold, but they can change Bitcoin’s rules – either through inept and corrupt developers or through a consensus among users that takes the wrong direction.
Therefore, with Bitcoin, you have an active responsibility: do it right.
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