Stories about Bitcoin seem to be the theme of my day. This piece is an interesting accompaniment to Avi Burra's piece on Salman Rushdie and Bitcoin (#1204186).
"Bitcoin is a constitutional order written in code and sustained by consent. One protocol, many software states."
I see where Kirkwood is going with the metaphor here, but I'm not sure that it works. Here's one of his longer paragraph's fleshing out the idea a bit
Every release of bitcoin core and every compatible implementation like bitcoin knots, libbitcoin, or btcd is a software state. Some citizens upgrade early or not at all, while others wait. Defaults vary and tooling differs. Yet the federation holds because the constitutional core is a shared set of rules that make a transaction valid.
Okay, thus far it makes sense. Everyone who uses Bitcoin is participating in a kind of voluntary union, bound by the need to agree on the exact state of the chain every 10 minutes or so. Kirkwood continues
Upgrades add clarity, utility, and constraints. They are proposed in public, adopted voluntarily, and enforced at the edges by those who consent to that specific state. No single authority decides for the rest. A growing number of nodes, the local courthouses of this union, adjudicate the valid and reject the invalid blocks, regardless of who mined it or the self-serving views of any given constituency. That is federalism without a map. One charter with many states all interoperating in a single union.
So in the metaphor, your node is a county courthouse in the state of whatever node software you are running (Core 29.0.0, Knots 20250305, Core 27.1.0, etc).
Where the metaphor breaks down for me is when it comes to this idea of a constitution (defining what the consensus rules actually are).