The new "OpenAI is asking the government for a bailout" narrative is hilarious. This of course implies that OpenAI is not the government. Well, OpenAI is actually the government. https://controlplanecapital.com/p/public-facing-elites-using-myth-making

I wrote on article on whether Bitcoin is decentralized and secure or is allowed to look decentralized and secure. Feel free to debunk it.

Is Bitcoin decentralized & secure or is it allowed to look that way

Bitcoin is permissionless in code but permissioned in practice by choke-points that governments and large intermediaries either directly control or...

TL;DR Bitcoin is permissionless in code but permissioned in practice by choke-points that governments and large intermediaries either directly control or can cheaply coerce. It’s allowed to look decentralized/secure so long as it functions primarily as a supervised store of value and speculative asset, not a mass medium of exchange outside compliance rails. Bitcoin’s design is decentralized in protocol, but the real-world control surface has shifted into layers above consensus: pools, clouds, app stores, and custody perimeters. These are the quiet levers that steer usage without changing the code.

The question that sent me down the rabbit hole a few months ago: - Is Bitcoin decentralized and secure, or is it allowed to look decentralized and secure? TL;DR Bitcoin is permissionless in code but permissioned in practice by choke-points that governments and large intermediaries either directly control or can cheaply coerce. It's allowed to look decentralized/secure so long as it functions primarily as a supervised store of value and speculative asset, not a mass medium of exchange outside compliance rails.

Something interesting to Game Theory. What would happen in the unlikely scenario that the plebs try to un-capture Bitcoin now that it's so entrenched into the financial system. It's a bit late in the game for it to get the full Monero treatment. Assume a materially higher Bitcoin Community Vigilance & Coordination (CVC): client diversity rises, mempool policy hardens, mining/pool governance decentralizes, anti-paperization/Proof-of-Reserve norms spread, and the community routes around choke points. Things that would be interesting to cover: - What "Operation Un-Capture" looks like in practice - Likely state/industry reaction - Likely outcomes - Price/vol & adoption dynamics - What would work for the plebs (and what backfires) My quick read is that the most likely outcome is a two-tier Bitcoin. - Tier 1 (Compliant BTC): ETF/custodial flows, payment gateways, regulated L2s. Clean UTXO sets fetch slight premium, fast merchant acceptance, low frictions — but full surveillance. - Tier 2 (Sovereign BTC): self-custody, privacy-hardened clients, peer channels; on/off-ramp friction rises, spreads widen, but actual censorship resistance improves.

Most of Bitcoin's success rides on the Community: Suggested Improvements If you consume Bitcoin content, most of what's discussed are protocol-level truths. However, based on my research, Bitcoin's survival and adoption depend on whether its most committed users can detect, coordinate, and counter inevitable policy, market, and social attacks. The Drivers of Success - TL;DR - Community Vigilance and Coordination (CVC): 50% How quickly and effectively the core community mobilizes around threats — through client diversity, mempool policy control, mining/pool governance, anti-paperization norms, Proof-of-Reserves (PoR) culture, and censorship-resistance operations. - Policy-Perimeter Exposure (PPE): 25% The network’s exposure to choke-points such as app stores, banks, cloud providers, internet service providers, custodians, and exchanges — and its ability to route around them. - Economic and Game-Theory Design (EGT): 15% The soundness of incentive structures: fee and issuance security budgets, validator or miner incentives, and containment of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). - Protocol and Infrastructure Quality (PIQ): 10% The technical foundation: client maturity, developer tooling, code audits, and use of formal verification methods. I've written about this and suggested improvements here: https://controlplanecapital.com/p/most-of-bitcoins-success-rides-on

Bitcoin's development process has been broken for a long time and Bitcoin's developers have failed the community. Developers have to start treating Bitcoin's users as stakeholders, not an audience they have contempt for. I wrote the first Bitcoin Development Governance Proposal (BDGP-1). This is a rough draft. If someone wants to work on it further/take the idea and write a better proposal, feel free to. https://controlplanecapital.com/p/bitcoin-development-governance-proposal

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.