I always find it comical when crypto folks cry their eyes out when something they don't subscribe to might be done to a blockchain they invested in.
Most times though, I try to remind myself that this isn't something unique to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, so these events in themselves are actually quite important because they reveal that at least, people that make up an ecosystem have varying thoughts.
Imagine if Bitcoiners all just always agreed on everything, at some point you have to suspect that it's centralized in the worst way possible right?
Before highlighting any of what's been heavily discussed in the Bitcoin community lately, I'll like to point out that I'm not taking sides, I literally have zero benefits to do so.
And speaking of benefits, when it comes to what people choose to do and back up, you can expect some tiny bits of self interest. Sometimes it won't be very evident but there's always a chance that personal benefits comes into play somewhere.
But again that's the beauty of it all and the reason for this article in the first place.
What most people fell to understand is that it doesn't matter if people do something for the greater good or personal interests, their ability to choose is what needs to be respected because anything else is a violation of their rights.
Does this means there won't be consequences? Of course not, the important thing is that the system is flexible enough to allow whatever to happen provided it's based on a consensus protocol that's always be considered “fair.”
The whole point of the first paragraph of this article is to show how stupid it is that people just suddenly hate the decentralized nature of a blockchain when something might not go their way.
So you could say, as the title reveals, this post is more about decentralization than anything else.
What's even happening on Bitcoin?
To say this in non-technical terms, there's some discussions to change a tiny bit of code on Bitcoin core and apparently people believe this would make Bitcoin an altcoin.
Reason for this conclusion? It appears that the code change would somehow lead to easier storage of monkey pictures on Bitcoin.
Of course not storage in a traditional sense, just think NFTs on Bitcoin without having to go through the struggles that hurts the normies brain when explained “how it all works.”
You know, I saw a headline today that I've bookmarked for later on how Vitalik Buterin plans to make Ethereum as simple as bitcoin and I couldn't help by chuckle cause I've never thought of Bitcoin to be the simple chain, maybe that's just cause I'm not a dev to understand it all. Either that or Vitalik is drawing closer to making Ethereum a Bitcoin L2, that would be really funny because every Ethereum L2 would now be a Bitcoin L3 by proxy and all apps would be Bitcoin apps and now Bitcoin maximalists would be forced to love them even though nothing has really changed except where TX finality is attained.
Wouldn't that be something?
Back to Bitcoin core. If you quickly do a search “Bitcoin core” on Twitter you'd probably get every gist that I can't include here to keep this article at reasonable length.
Decentralization is messy, Bitcoiners need to get used to it
The reason why I've always hated politics is because it's a game of various cults fighting each other at the expense of everyone else and because it's all cults in there, people can't have minds of their own and have to stick out to the club no matter how bad whatever is being done is.
This is what most traditional systems look like. There are centralized in ways that the word “centralized” doesn't quite capture.
Now, the funny thing about these systems is that they are less messy. Not because it's a really good system but because very few get to decide what happens so there's essentially really not much room for any mess.
Now the mess being referenced here is internal opposition because outside of that, there's a lot of mess, evidently, we see it in the government and in the business world.
Decentralized systems on the other hand are a lot messier because the mess exists within and in the outer ecosystems, and that is exactly the beauty of it.
Decentralization allows for anyone to attack your belief systems as a top voice and stand a chance to be supported by others and win against you. In a centralized system, you could easily leverage your position to surpress such flexibility.
When Bitcoiners fail to understand that literally anyone at anytime can decide to build whatever on Bitcoin and could potentially get support from the developer community or investors with huge influence in the ecosystem, it just shows that they don't quite understand what it means for any system to be decentralized.
The whole campaign to never change the code and essentially shutdown anyone who tries that is just as right as all opposing campaigns.
You want the code unchanged, I want it changed, we are both right for wanting what we want, now it's just up to the larger network to decide where to stay with respect to the concensus rules of the chain.
Of course, what's being discussed in itself may not require onchain consensus, but this is software we are dealing with, so concensus is more than just what is directly done onchain. In the case of Bitcoin core, people can simply not use it if they disagree with this development or continue using it if they agree.
It is really that simple. Of course, this conclusion also makes out every piece of campaign against Bitcoin core right now to be valid but the problem is most of those campaigning are hypocrites because they can't actually lose if they truly believe in what they are campaigning for.
What does that mean?
Most of these campaigns are just fear-driven because if you really disagree with something in this ecosystem, a hardfork is the most appropriate thing to do, but these people fear that they may not win over the current investors probably since past forks evidently didn't do so well.
So you see how this all can just be greed in play and essentially one side trying to make the chain rigid rather than flexible as decentralization should permit?