Originally posted on X (https://x.com/heavilyarmedc/status/1971610171777421488)

One of the biggest mistakes I've seen people make in trying to understand Bitcoin, is making an incorrect distinction between Bitcoin, the software network with its native monetary token BTC, and its corresponding backend software, the reference implementation known as Bitcoin Core.

Here's why getting this distinction right matters much more than many realize.

In order to have a distributed consensus, or a set of rules all users in the network agree upon, on the internet and without trusted 3rd parties, we each have to give a very particular set of instructions to our computers (in the form of computer code) that tell it exactly what we want it to do.

For most people, this means delegating the creation of those particular instructions to specialized individuals that are really good at talking to computers and thinking about complex systems.

A user who is not competent in giving computers instructions, would obviously have no ability to create or maintain something as complex as a distributed system with a sybil resistant single source of truth (aka an open source money network). In such cases, most users delegate the formation of those instructions to the specialists.

In order to facilitate the complexities of this open source money network, we must each give the same set of instructions to our computers. If at any time we want to change those instructions, we must think carefully about how our new instructions interact with old instructions still running in the wild. Significant changes will result in segregated networks, or as we call it within Bitcoin, consensus splits.

Bitcoin was the very first viable, distributed open source money network. For the earliest Bitcoiners, the formation of these special computer instructions was delegated entirely to Satoshi, but soon quickly grew to become a conglomerate of other open source money network software contributors.

Bitcoin was released by Satoshi as Free and Open Source Software under the MIT license. This means that the software is free to use, copy or change, by anyone, for anything, even commercially. Because of this inherent freedom to do whatever you want with the software, many people have gone on to change it in a wide variety of ways. Bitcoin has had a considerable number of forks from the original code as released by Satoshi. The question then becomes, how do we determine which set of changes is now Bitcoin?

Any end user is free to learn the manipulation of software to this end of instructing their computer in complex tasks. A short time after Bitcoin's initial release, all users (non technical and technical alike) were faced with the choice of which software to run, and also which tokens to buy (or sell), if they wanted to participate in this open and permission-less monetary network playground.

These people, among others, have then gone on to run many different changed versions of the original Bitcoin code. This quickly becomes a competition of attracting serious contributors to the code base & users of the software in order to be both the dominant software implementation and the dominant monetary network & token.

Not only is this highly competitive but it is extremely high stakes because of the volatile nature of emergent digital money.

Almost without exception, Bitcoin Core, which is an open source process for changing and releasing computer instructions for a distributed monetary network known as Bitcoin, has been the top dog in this field.

The market knows this software more generally as just simply “Bitcoin”. What makes Bitcoin , or Bitcoin Core, so valuable is its open source change review process, combined with having the best contributors and the most users.

Many mistakenly think that Bitcoin is the best merely because it was first, but this is a futile grasping at a much more ephemeral concept. The special set of computer instructions first released by Satoshi Nakamoto known as Bitcoin, have changed considerably since its first release. With each change, the market, or in other words the end users of the software, must continuously decide which set of computer instructions to run.

Bitcoin Core is not controlled by any one group but rather is a loose collective of contributors that want to work on the best money software in the world. Its processes of technical change review are what has guided it and maintained it as the definer of, literally, what Bitcoin is. In every sense of the word, this is a technocracy.

This was much more obvious earlier in Bitcoin life when other competing cryptocurrencies were more similar to Bitcoin in their design. In fact, oftentimes their changes were fairly trivial, uneconomic, or made very poorly weighed design tradeoffs that introduced flaws and vulnerabilities.

Bitcoin is free and open source. You cannot stop developers from changing & releasing the code, and you cannot stop users from running whatever code they choose.

To contend with this reality that anyone can change the code, and users have to decide what to run, the technical audience that cares about such problems has focused its attention on Bitcoin Core development. Bitcoin core has, bar none the most eyes, the most testing, the most scrutiny, and the most review of any open source money network software in existence.

The open source and transparent nature of the change review process combined with the caliber of its contributors has, naturally, made Bitcoin Core the dominant money protocol and by extension Bitcoin the best and most dominant digital money. Core is the reference implementation of Bitcoin. It literally defines what the rules of Bitcoin are because its specialist contributors literally change the instructions we give to our computers to access the Bitcoin network. If a set of instructions (software client) were to deviate from this set of instructions provided by the reference implementation, in many cases they would end up segregated on their own separate network with their own separate token.

This brand known as Bitcoin and its token BTC, does not belong de facto to Bitcoin Core indefinitely, but rather Bitcoin Core has maintained this brand, because it is the best open source money network implementation. You might think this gives the contributors to Bitcoin Core all of the power in the network, however, there is a more important piece… It is the users who get to decide which set of instructions to run and which token to buy or sell. An open source money network is useless without users and it can’t exist without developers, thus both parties are consequential but have different (and often overlapping) roles. If Bitcoin Core did not steward its responsibility as the reference implementation well, it could easily lose the ability to define what Bitcoin is to a different, competing implementation. Likewise, if users do not steward their responsibility well it can be economically detrimental for them.

There are two, often confused, categories of changes to Bitcoin's code. Soft forks which are backwards compatible changes and hard forks which are not.

For the most part other cryptocurrencies, which are all competing Bitcoin software implementations and money networks, were what you would call hard forks. This means they made changes to the code which were not backwards compatible with old versions of the Bitcoin software and would inevitably result in a segregated money network compared to the older versions, when run by users.

Typically these competing projects didn't try to contentiously split the existing Bitcoin network (with a few exceptions), but rather tried to spin themselves off as different entities or brands entirely. Their stated goal was not to compete with Bitcoin but to coexist with it.

This was largely done for marketing reasons, and what allowed so many spin off Bitcoin's to proliferate under different brand names was primarily the "many monies" fallacy promulgated by Andreas Antonoplus et al. By and large, the changes made to these alternative Bitcoin implementations were the kinds of changes that never would have made it through the scrutiny of Bitcoin Core’s open source change review process.

As we all know, networks (and especially money networks with a native monetary asset) naturally want to converge to one.

Soft forks, on the other hand, are a different matter in that they are carefully designed to be backwards compatible changes to the software. In other words, if you activate a softfork of Bitcoin's software and a not insignificant number of users decide to run it, other participants in the network must contend with the results, but are not necessarily required to upgrade their software.

Again, Bitcoin is free and open source, nobody can stop this change review process, or stop developers from changing the code, or stop users from choosing which code to run.

In the case of a soft fork and as best as I can tell, the scenarios can play out several different ways for the users:

-Users will accept the results of the activation of a new soft fork and do nothing (or upgrade their software if they wish)

-Users will reject the new soft fork with softfork change of their own, designed to invalidate the previous softfork, and likely resulting in a chain split, which means two segregated networks and two different tokens with two different sets of rules.

-Users knowingly fork off into a separate network with or without trying to force a contentious chain split (many more examples of the latter in crypto). Most forks in Bitcoin’s history have not originated directly contentious splits, because most competing implementations desired to be viewed as complements to the existing Bitcoin network rather than direct competitors. This is because any serious technical contributor knows that Bitcoin Core’s technical change review process has no equal. By spinning narratives that there could be many competing monies on many complementary money networks, less technical users and economic illiterates could be duped into enriching a small group of savvy whales on a particular network.

This process has been ongoing in Bitcoin since its creation, and this is extremely important for grokking "what is Bitcoin" and what it means for Bitcoin Core to be Bitcoin's reference implementation and what it means to have a distributed consensus.

If we imagine a future, hypothetical scenario where malicious actors gain control of the reference implementation's source code and push out a malicious softfork, it becomes more clear why. At this point end users are faced with a choice from one of the options previously mentioned above.

Remember, Bitcoin is free and open source and anyone can change its code. Since you cannot stop this process of code changes, you must contend with it. It is and always will be emergent. This is what makes the reference implementation in a project like Bitcoin so incredibly important, it is essentially a guiding light. It is earned trust by the nature of the fact that its change process is open and transparent. If end users don’t like the product of that change process, they always have the choice to run different software.

If the reference implementation were to start merging bad changes or stop merging good changes to its source code, there is nothing stopping a competing implementation from supplanting it as the de facto reference implementation by making good improvements of its own.

You simply cannot separate Bitcoin from its reference implementation because its reference implementation decides what it is.

Monetary networks that operate on a distributed consensus based on the Free and Open Source Software known as Bitcoin are competitive products trying to solve a complex problem for end users.

At the end of the day it is the end users who must choose what software to run and what token to buy, in the case of a contentious split you are forced to make this decision on the fly.

You can only build upon or fracture Bitcoin's existing software network in so much as you are able to convince others to abide by your preferred rule set and to run your software.

I am an advocate for Bitcoin (colloquially a Bitcoin Maxi), I am by extension an advocate of its reference implementation which is Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin core gets to call its token Bitcoin because it is the dominant protocol in the distributed money network universe.

I do not say this because I'm particularly partial to any one individual that contributes to the project, but rather that I see it as the only serious collective, open source effort to build a robust monetary network protocol. The market largely agrees.

Changes to Bitcoin include considerations for all sorts of factors, as Bitcoin is a very esoteric discipline.

History has proven that Bitcoin Core, and its open source process for making changes to Bitcoin's set of computer instructions compiled and released for end users, is the best monetary network protocol.

Non technical or corporate politicking doesn't work in this universe (see the failed New York Agreement). No amount of philosophical rambling and podcasts should be able to affect this process. It is purely technical.

If politicking ever started to work to control Bitcoin Core's change review process, I can guarantee the people who are really good at giving instructions to computers would move to a different project and make that one better instead.

Like I said, Bitcoin is a technocracy, but even the software contributors are its users. What end users get from all of this is the choice to accept or reject any change, because Bitcoin is and has always been Free and Open Source.