How Bitcoin's developers have failed the community This will not be a technical post, I can eventually write one on the specifics of how Bitcoin's developers have weakened Bitcoin’s sovereign / monetary (MoE) use. In this post, I'll cover the predictable chaos that developer have caused. 99% of users should have never had to know what OP_RETURN is — and the fact they do means Bitcoin's developers have failed the community. The fact that non-technical users have had to learn about these details is a massive failure on the part of the developers. Now you have users taking sides on a soft-fork debate purely based on their blind faith in influencers without understanding the technicalities. When UX abstraction fails, politics invades the base layer: - Money that requires protocol literacy isn't money yet. If non-technical holders must parse mempool policy, witness discounts, inscription hacks, or soft-fork signaling to judge existential risk, you've leaked governance from experts to the masses without giving them power — just anxiety. - Abstraction debt. Bitcoin's developers are no longer shipping "safe defaults". That created a vacuum where influencers do protocol comms, and users pick tribes by vibes. - Legitimacy hazard. The minute regulars think "the rules can shift under me", your store-of-value narrative becomes contingent on whoever writes/merges code, not on time. That's a reputational tax that compounds. In the Bitcoin ecosystem (developers, miners/pools, exchanges/custodians, state/regulators), no actor with power is optimizing for "simple, sovereign Medium-of-Exchange for the masses". They optimize for revenue, deniability, and policy compatibility. All of this chaos and retail anxiety caused by developers will lead more people to ETFs/custody adoption and will lessen self-custody and MoE use. If node policy changes keep enabling more and easier illegal payloads, pressure lands on runners/miners first. Captured developers is the most asymmetric attack vector - it hits sovereign users hardest, while leaving institutional wrappers unaffected. Developers have to start treating Bitcoin's users as stakeholders, not an audience they have contempt for. The only way out of this is for the users to start working on a rough draft of constraints that should be imposed on the developers. I might write a very rough version eventually.

The most likely outcome is that many Bitcoin holders will "succeed" by accident (fiat gains over time) because Bitcoin is the containable focal asset that keeps attention away from more off-grid rails (e.g. Monero). That isn't an endorsement of freedom; it's incentives doing crowd control. I'll write more about this later, but: - Privacy-by-default is a political non-starter (especially in a low Gross Consent Product cycle). Bitcoin's base case: Managed cyclicality, net up over multi-year windows, less upside convexity than "maximalists" hope, more containment than cypherpunks want. So Bitcoin is the sanctioned pressure valve. That design likely lets many holders win in fiat terms while the system keeps Medium-of-Exchange at scale off the table and diverts attention from privacy rails. It's not emancipation; it's containment with upside. A few signals that support this reading (non-exhaustive): - Growth of ETF/ETN share of total BTC exposure; - App-store/wallet policy pressure toward KYC defaults; - Tax and reporting regimes that bless ETF/custody rails while frictioning self-custody; - Selective exchange de-risking of privacy coins; - Compliance narratives that frame privacy-by-default as aberrant but Bitcoin Store-of-Value as acceptable. Many holders will win in fiat terms - by accident, not because the system ceded control. I don't own any Monero, but I still appreciate the community. Definitely not a shitcoin.

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 (

GitHub

Releases · bitcoin/bitcoin

Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree. Contribute to bitcoin/bitcoin development by creating an account 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.

How crazy is it that "Bitcoin maximalists" care about this guy's opinion at all? Scott Bessent was a partner at Soros Fund Management for most of his career (1991-2000 and again 2011-2015). Bessent was instrumental in significant financial strategies, including a major profit during the British Pound crisis in 1992. In 2011, he returned to Soros Fund Management, where he managed billions in assets and made a notable bet against the Japanese yen, yielding substantial profits. Bessent chaired the investment committee and is a former member of the executive committee on the board of trustees of Rockefeller University. Bessent is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Bessent has participated in Dialog, a secretive, invitation-only social club founded by Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman. He is also a member of the Economic Club of New York. As of December 28, 2024, Bessent's net worth was at least $521 million according to his financial assets disclosure by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics; his actual net worth is speculated to be around $600 million. So, tell me, Bitcoin maximalists, do you think this guy really wants what's best for Bitcoin? 😂 It's like the Bitcoin maximalist who was calling out Jamie Dimon for being Epstein's banker and then started a company with Epstein's neighbor (Howard Lutnick). If you blindly follow influencers, it might turn out that they don't have your best interest at heart. The only solution is to do your own research.

So why did Luke Dashjr say "Hashrate is irrelevant at this point"? I won't pretend to know what his opinion is, I'll just give you mine. 1) Mining isn't decentralized — pools are (allegedly, not really). Why are pools not decentralized? Because the interests of "rival" countries converge more often than most realize (More context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/rivalry-between-countries-is-curated ). Hashrate aggregates into ~5–7 top pools; 2–3 could cross 51% at times. Miners "vote with feet", but: - Payout variance pushes them to big pools. - Pools integrate with regulated fiat ramps and insurers; they may adopt OFAC/blacklist templates to avoid headaches. Template power: Pools select transactions. If major pools adopt "policy clients" (e.g., template filters, blacklists), settlement becomes steerable — even if blocks remain valid under consensus. So what? Incentives favor pool compliance with state policy — especially when insurance, utilities, and public listings are involved. 2) Hardware & energy are choke-points (supply-chain centralization) - ASIC oligopoly. 2–3 manufacturers dominate. Firmware signing, remote management, and replacement cycles create vendor leverage. - Jurisdictional energy. Large industrial miners rely on permits, grid interconnects, subsidies. In a low Gross Consent Product environment, regulators swap "ideals" for "stability" — conditional access > rights. - Policy carrot/stick: cheap power for curtailment agreements, transaction policies, ESG attestations; penalties for non-compliant operators. So what? If you need the grid and the power plant, the power plant owns you, and guess who owns the power plant. I have just described the current state of mining "decentralization". Of course this could improve/worsen in the future. Unless mining decentralization improves significantly, increasing hashrate is irrelevant at this point.

While I agree with the "1 BTC = 1 BTC" message, it tends to oversimplify a lot. There are probably less than 1,000 people in the world who think like that. If we're being realists, BTC's fiat price steers adoption. I have to eventually write an article on this, but TL;DR: - Rising fast (parabolic): pulls in retail, startups, politicians; self-custody curiosity spikes; merchant trials tick up; miners expand; headlines flood. - Rising slowly (orderly): allocators drip into paper wrappers (ETFs, trusts, notes); retail complacent; self-custody flattens; "digital gold" narrative cements. - Sideways/high chop: demoralizes newcomers; keeps maxi zealots only; institutions run carry/arbitrage, not usage. - Sharp crashes: drive capitulation; justify "we need guardrails" laws; push users to custodians; kill merchant/Lightning momentum. Goal if you're the Controllers: maintain containment corridors — enough upside to keep hope & tax receipts, enough draw-downs to prevent broad self-custody or Medium-of-Exchange habits. Price is the billboard; you want the billboard to say "speculative asset — use our rails (stablecoins/CBDCs) for payments".

My Financial Market Predictions for the next 2 years TL;DR Over the next two years, policy chooses stability over truth and control over fairness — which means short shocks, quick backstops, sticky 3–4% inflation (CPI, not real), and rising spend on identity/compliance/decision lineage. That flow structurally favors state-embedded software (Palantir/Microsoft first), platform security, and provenance rails. TL;DR on Bitcoin: Base path: managed cyclicality; paper share (ETFs/futures) rises → realized volatility declines; upside corridors capped during leverage frenzies via liquidity hunts; sharp drawdowns still permitted when narrative cover exists. Price path (2y view): broad $85k – $180k corridor with 1–3 engineered breakouts/fakeouts; tails on policy moments. --- Let's see how I do compared to the analysts with red, fiery thumbnails. More context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/my-financial-market-predictions-for

Did the CIA create Bitcoin and whether it actually matters This one turned out to be my best article to date. TL;DR Whether “CIA made Bitcoin” is the wrong question. The right question is: who operates the knobs? Revealed preference says the Controllers prefer containment, not bans: paperize the upside, surveil the edges, tax the flows, and keep the “freedom” brand alive as a pressure valve. You don’t need origin to win the game — you need the perimeters. https://controlplanecapital.com/p/did-the-cia-create-bitcoin-and-whether

What actually breaks my Bitcoin containment thesis TL;DR Containment relies on perimeters (banks, app stores, clouds, pools, payment networks), not just statutes. The only way out is either (a) make those perimeters look less safe than BTC, or (b) align powerful actors’ incentives (energy, megacaps, reserves) with BTC’s success. Bottom line: Most days, containment holds — that’s the revealed preference. But I wanted to explore what actually breaks it: trust failures at the core, public censorship optics, paper custody failure, sovereign hedging, capital controls, CBDC backfires, or a client-level schism. More context: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/what-actually-breaks-my-bitcoin-containment

Finally done with twitter. I've published all the Bitcoin articles I wanted to publish.

X (formerly Twitter)

Control-Plane Capital (@ControlPlaneCap) on X

Software engineer turned investor.

And mostly done with my Bitcoin research. I've got like 10-15 Bitcoin-related things I'd like to research but they are 2nd/3rd tier.