[...]

Let me put a name to what happened, because an economist described this machine long before Satoshi wired it together.

Friedrich Hayek spent his career on a single subversive idea: that the most important kinds of order in human life are not designed by anyone. Language, common law, market prices, none of it was drafted by a central planner and handed down. It emerged, from the bottom up, out of millions of people acting on their own local knowledge and coordinating through a few shared rules, with no one of them in charge of the whole. He called it spontaneous order, and he drew a hard line between an order that is grown and an order that is merely made.

His warning was aimed squarely at the planners who believed a clever enough group could sit at the top and design a better order by decree. He named that belief the fatal conceit. The curious task of economics, he wrote, is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

BIP-110 was, and I say this with real respect for the conviction behind it, a small brush with the fatal conceit. A group certain it knew what Bitcoin should be tried to impose that vision from the top, through an ingenious bit of forcing logic, onto a system whose entire nature is that nobody sits at the top. The network did not route around the rule because the underlying worry was stupid. It routed around it because that is what a spontaneous order does to a decree it did not choose. The rule had to be adopted voluntarily, node by node and miner by miner, or it was never a rule at all. It was a very well-argued opinion running on 2.5% of the hashrate.

And this is where the easy narrative breaks, so I'll say it plainly. The anti-spam camp is not foolish and its concern is not fake. As one Bitcoiner put it in the wreckage, being against spam was the right instinct, and BIP-110 was still a bad idea. You can hold both at once. You can believe the chain is cluttered with junk and still believe that no developer, however brilliant, gets to unilaterally reach in and rewrite the rules for everyone else. Holding both is arguably the most Bitcoin position on the board.

...read more at bitcoinwell.com