The Great Asymmetry: What BIP-110 Reveals About Who Governs Bitcoin

BIP-110’s defeat is being celebrated as proof that Bitcoin’s decentralized consensus successfully prevented a small minority from imposing its will. But that interpretation begins the story at the wrong point. Bitcoin Core had already altered Bitcoin’s practical direction through the dominant implementation’s defaults, without having to demonstrate miner signaling, economic-majority approval, or broad node-runner consent. Miners could then profit from the more permissive direction, while exchanges, large holders, institutions, and influential voices preserved its economic and narrative continuity. Those attempting to restore the earlier restrictive monetary direction had to clear a radically higher bar since they had to convert what had formerly been a policy norm into consensus rules and then win enough hashpower and economic recognition to prevent isolation.

The defeat of BIP-110 therefore did not occur on neutral ground. It reveals a great asymmetry between the power to establish a new practical default and the power required to resist or reverse it. While individual validation remains, its practical effect can become weak when development, defaults, mining, narrative, liquidity, and ticker recognition align against the individual node. Bitcoin is therefore neither simply decentralized nor controlled by one sovereign centre. What we shall demonstrate here is that Bitcoin now operates on an oligopolistically mediated consensus—formally distributed validation within material conditions substantially established by a limited number of interconnected or incentive-aligned power centres—and that structure endangers self-sovereignty and freedom money, placing the institutional defences of sound money at longer-term risk.

Note: We based our article on Hodlonaut’s series, Capture: The Network, The Lever, and The Merge. Part 4 of the series is yet to be published.

We will not cite them here as they are too many, but a great many are celebrating and even gloating on Twitter after BIP-110’s failure. Popular Bitcoiners see the low signaling, the slow minority chain, and the apparent defeat of Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin Mechanic, Matthew Kratter, hodlonaut, Bitcoin Knots, OCEAN, Dathon Ohm, and other BIP-110 supporters. Their verdict: a small group tried to dictate new rules; decentralized Bitcoin refused; therefore Bitcoin worked exactly as designed.

An important question we must ask, however: Who changed the practical status quo first, and what did each side have to do to make its preferred direction effective? The celebration examines only the final signaling contest, but ignores the institutional acts that determined the terrain before that contest began. Core’s side could establish the practical new normal without passing anything resembling the test of consent that the restoration side (BIP-110) was later required to pass.

BIP-110 may have lost, but the manner of its loss reveals that Bitcoin’s opposing sides no longer possess anything close to equal power to determine what Bitcoin becomes. One may reject BIP-110’s particular rules or activation mechanism and still perceive the asymmetry.

Bitcoin had long maintained an antagonistic posture toward arbitrary on-chain data through relay and mining policy, including the familiar 83-byte OP_RETURN limit. Inscriptions then exploited routes the existing setting did not cover effectively. Luke Dashjr proposed extending filtering against those methods. Core rejected that proposal and later moved in the opposite direction: v30 raised the default-datacarriersize to 100,000 bytes, effectively uncapping it within the standard transaction-size limit, and permitted multiple OP_RETURN outputs.

Only after that institutional movement did BIP-110 arise. Its stated purpose was therefore restorative rather than revolutionary: to reverse Core’s policy change, re-establish Bitcoin’s monetary priority, resist arbitrary-data storage, and protect node operators. But it attempted to do so through new temporary consensus restrictions because relay policy alone could not stop cooperating miners from placing formally valid data transactions into blocks.

A crucial distinction and premise: BIP-110 was technically a new consensus soft fork, but historically and in final purpose it was a reaction against a prior change in Bitcoin’s practical direction.

Core’s path to practical effect was extraordinarily short—a proposal entered the dominant implementation, received the attention, review, and ACKs deemed sufficient to advance, was merged by a maintainer, and later shipped as the default in Core v30. It took 38 days to establish the new direction in the dominant codebase, followed by an ordinary release cycle—not five months spent obtaining consent from Bitcoin’s wider body of users. At the center of that institutional chain were Antoine Poinsot, Peter Todd, Greg Sanders, Anthony Towns, Pieter Wuille, Gloria Zhao, and Michael Ford.

Core did not have to: 1) obtain a 55 or 95 percent miner-signaling threshold; 2) risk a chain split nor persuade exchanges to recognize a different ticker; or 3) prove that most node runners understood and affirmatively chose the change. Software dominance supplied continuity, and ordinary upgrading distributed the new default. Thus, in only 38 days, an institutional chain in which just one of seven had a publicly verifiable Bitcoin-only record—while most of the others had professional or financial connections of varying degrees to the altcoin and issued-asset ecosystem—established the new direction in Bitcoin’s dominant codebase.

The path of resistance was altogether different. From Dathon Ohm’s first public draft on October 24, 2025, to the split on August 8, 2026, BIP-110 supporters spent 288 days attempting to assemble the coalition necessary to make their resistance effective. They had to write and maintain alternative software, persuade users to leave the dominant implementation, persuade miners to surrender profitable transaction-selection discretion, obtain enough hashpower for a usable chain, persuade exchanges and businesses to recognize that chain, and risk becoming economically isolated if the coalition failed.

The implementation alone took 160 days to enter Bitcoin Knots—more than four times Core’s entire 38-day decision-making window. At the center of that technical chain were at least eight identifiable contributors and reviewers: Dathon Ohm, Luke Dashjr, Léo Haf (Retropex), Lőrinc (l0rinc), Kyle Santiago (kwsantiago), Chris Guida, stackitdeep, and Ari4ka (sources here and here). But getting the proposal written, reviewed, tested, and incorporated into an alternative implementation was only the beginning. When the crucial window arrived, only 51 of the preceding 2,016 blocks—2.53 percent—had signaled support. The enforcing branch initially obtained enough hashpower to mine only two blocks, both produced through OCEAN by the pseudonymous Roughnecks operation, before stalling (sources here and here).

The numerical contrast is shocking. Core needed 38 days and seven central institutional actors to establish the new direction in the dominant codebase. The resistance spent 160 days merely getting its code into an alternative implementation and 288 days attempting to assemble the economic coalition necessary to make that resistance effective—and still entered the crucial period with only 2.53 percent miner signaling.

This is the unequal rule of change. The permissive side (Core) could alter Bitcoin’s practical direction below the consensus level through control of the dominant default. The restrictive side (BIP-110) could make its resistance effective only by fighting at the consensus level, where the burden of coordination was immeasurably higher. Note: Restrictive here is not a bad thing as those crying foul about censorship would like us to believe. Bitcoin is money, and like every determinate thing, it depends upon limits that preserve what it is. The question is therefore which restrictions preserve its monetary purpose and which forms of permissiveness dissolve it. Those who treat every restriction as censorship confuse freedom with permissiveness.

And here is the ratchet: a permissive policy is introduced; miners and commercial projects begin relying upon it; the use becomes normalized; a constituency forms around it; reversal now appears disruptive; resistance requires consensus restrictions; and those restrictions are then condemned as an attempt to change Bitcoin. The initial policy change thereby acquires the protection of the very consensus barrier it never had to cross.

One side could establish the new normal without first proving consensus (Core); the other side was required to prove consensus merely to resist it (BIP-110).

Here we address the most common “technical” answer: Core v30 changed relay and mining policy, not block-validity rules—which is “technically” true. Blocks containing larger OP_RETURN outputs could already be consensus-valid, and v30 did not raise Bitcoin’s maximum block weight or make old nodes accept formally invalid blocks.

But there is a sleight of hand here, as that “correct classification” is made to carry an “unwarranted political conclusion”: because consensus validity did not change, Core supposedly did not govern Bitcoin in any important sense, impose a direction, or create a new status quo. But there is a reality underneath this that has been obscured—policy in the dominant implementation decides what ordinary nodes relay, what enters their mempools, what default mining templates accommodate, what software behaviour most upgrading users inherit, and what uses receive official infrastructural support. When one implementation dominates, its defaults are not merely the private preferences of one node runner. They become the practical architecture through which much of the network operates.

Hence, policy, not consensus correctly identifies the layer at which Core acted, but it does not absolve Core of exercising disproportionate power. And that identifies the very mechanism by which practical centralization can advance without presenting itself as a formal protocol takeover.

Here we move from the code change to the structure that decides which code obtains attention, legitimacy, and eventual inclusion. In Hodlonaut’s The Network, we can see

the closely connected pipelines of recruitment, mentorship, funding, media standing, and institutional access around Bitcoin Core. In The Lever, we are shown the negative side of the same structure—inconvenient contributors need not be formally expelled if funding goes elsewhere, reviews cease, maintainership proposals stall, invitations disappear, and association with dissent becomes professionally costly. In The Merge,

these forces converge in the OP_RETURN sequence, where: 1) alternatives did not receive symmetrical treatment, 2) opposition was discounted or moderated, 3) commercial use cases entered the justification, and 4) the institutional proposal advanced.

We don’t need a conspiracy theory as the structure itself objectively illustrates the oligopolistic power that operates through overlapping relationships, shared premises, professional dependence, reputational pressure, and aligned incentives. Formal openness can coexist with practical closure when a small network disproportionately controls entry, funding, review attention, merging, moderation, and institutional memory.

And here we make another crucial distinction—speaking and possessing an effective route to decision are not the same thing. Institutions and individuals already possessing power structurally equipped certain people with that route, while dissenters who might have supplied checks and balances were left, at best, with the ability to speak. In other words, dissenters were free to speak, but the institutional network possessed the route by which speech became funding, review, legitimacy, and finally a merged default. One side had a voice; the other had the machinery of decision.

Here we bring clarity to the popular slogan: miners do not control Bitcoin because full nodes reject invalid blocks. This is “technically” true. While a miner cannot force an existing validating node to accept inflation, an invalid signature, or a block violating that node’s rules, miners decide which consensus-valid transactions enter the blocks they produce. If nearly all hashpower continues building a chain your node rejects, your preferred chain may: 1) produce blocks extremely slowly, 2) transactions may remain unconfirmed, 3) wallets and merchants may abandon it, and 4) exchanges may decline to recognize it.

This is what BIP-110 demonstrated in practice—while the dissident node retained the formal authority to say no, the overwhelming hashpower helped make the consequences of that refusal economically severe. So while the individual veto survived logically, it was weak operationally.

That’s the incentive asymmetry: 1) a miner receives the one-time fee for including data; 2) node operators receive none of that revenue but must download and validate the block, 3) archival nodes store and serve the history, and 4) future node runners must acquire and validate it. The miner’s benefit is concentrated and immediate, while some of the costs are dispersed through the validating network and extended into the future.

Even genuinely decentralized mining would not have removed the problem exposed by BIP-110. By the time miners were asked to resist, Core had already placed permissiveness inside the dominant software default. Ordinary upgrading then distributed that default, hence: 1) users largely inherited it without affirmatively choosing it; 2) miners had to understand what had happened; 3) they had to coordinate, accept possible financial losses, and redirect enough hashpower to sustain a resisting chain; and 4) exchanges and businesses still had to supply that chain with economic recognition.

Although the policy change did not make resistance logically futile, it made permissiveness the inherited reality and forced resistance onto the prohibitively more difficult consensus and economic planes. And actual mining concentration made this already grave asymmetry worse as: 1) much of the hardware and hashpower is concentrated in industrial operations; 2) block construction is further concentrated in a few pools; and 3) individual miners’ theoretical ability to redirect hashpower produced no material resistance. Whether miners acted from profit, ignorance, inertia, or inability, the result was the same—they supplied no effective check. Subsequent public statements indicating that BIP-110 opponents worked through back channels to influence major pools further support this judgment. While they do not prove that one actor controlled the entire outcome, they reveal how a comparatively small institutional network could obtain an effective route to the concentrated machinery of block production.

Miners therefore deserve particular scrutiny, but their failure also showed that they were neither the first nor the greatest point of control. By the time hashpower could have acted as a check, the dominant policy default had already shaped the incentives and coordination problem it faced. The earlier and structurally upstream power lay in the implementation able to make permissiveness the inherited norm and force everyone outside it to assemble an extraordinary coalition merely to resist—the policy layer, which happened to be Core.

Here we need to again make important distinctions that popular Bitcoin education often compresses into “your node decides”: 1) Validation sovereignty is the power to decide which blocks your node accepts—and this remains genuinely individual; 2) Network sovereignty is the ability to participate in a sufficiently mined and connected chain that functions normally—and this requires other people; and 3) Economic sovereignty is the ability to use that chain as recognized money with counterparties, liquidity, wallets, merchants, and exchanges—this requires a still larger coalition.

The first is individually absolute, while the other two are not. Your node determines what you recognize as Bitcoin, but it cannot, by itself, determine which chain the surrounding economy will recognize as BTC. This does not mean personal validation is useless, but it is an argument against turning one real but limited power into a mythology of total user control—because a right of refusal is not the same as an effective power to govern—particularly when exercising that refusal may mean economic exile.

BIP-110 made this distinction concrete. Its supporters retained validation sovereignty, as their nodes could reject blocks violating the restrictions they had chosen. But without sufficient miners, users, exchanges, wallets, and businesses following those rules, that individual refusal could not produce either network or economic sovereignty. Their nodes possessed the negative power to say “no,” but not the positive power to make that “no” govern a functioning Bitcoin economy.

This is why “your node decides” is true but radically incomplete. Your node only decides what you will accept; it does not decide: 1) which rules miners will build upon, 2) which chain exchanges will recognize as BTC, or 3) which money the surrounding economy will use.

And this reveals the limit of node sovereignty—and returns us to the policy layer: by placing permissiveness inside the dominant implementation, Core established the default around which users, miners, wallets, exchanges, and businesses would ordinarily coordinate. By the time dissenting nodes exercised their sovereignty, the larger network and economic realities had already formed around the opposing policy.

Bitcoin is not simply centralized in the manner of a corporation or central bank. We have already been told too many times: no single actor commands all developers, miners, exchanges, nodes, and capital; and old validating nodes still impose hard limits upon what any new software release can make them accept. While those are real barriers, “no one controls everything” does not mean that power is widely distributed. Practical outcomes have been produced through the interaction of a limited number of powerful centres: 1) Core-linked maintainers, reviewers, funders, training pipelines, and employers influence development and defaults; 2) mining pools and large miners control effective block production and profit from transaction inclusion; 3) exchanges, custodians, ETF institutions, and major businesses heavily influence ticker recognition and liquidity; and 4) large holders, prominent personalities, podcasters, conference figures, specialist media, and social-media influencers shape what counts as legitimate Bitcoin and how institutional decisions are presented to the wider public.

The narrative group (influencers) deserves particular attention because it serves as the visible mouthpiece through which the interests, assumptions, and decisions of the other centres are translated into an apparent popular consensus. Many derive income, access, or status precisely because they possess influence—through sponsorships, employment, institutional access, conference standing, subscriptions, or audience reach—whether they know it or not. Their extraordinary visibility on Twitter can make a comparatively small and interconnected circle appear to speak for Bitcoin itself. While they do not necessarily make the policy, mine the blocks, or determine the ticker themselves, they help persuade everyone else that the resulting outcomes represent the spontaneous judgment of a decentralized network.

We don’t need to be conspiratorial. These centres need not meet in one room or obey one master. Alignment of incentives, relationships, dependencies, and assumptions is sufficient to establish the practical field within which consensus is later “discovered.”

Bitcoin now exhibits oligopolistically mediated consensus—formally distributed validation operating within practical conditions disproportionately established by a small number of interconnected or incentive-aligned centres of power. Consensus is therefore not the independent first cause imagined in popular rhetoric, and economically operative consensus is increasingly the downstream result of development, defaults, narrative, mining, capital, custody, and exchange recognition.

The danger cannot be measured merely by asking whether Bitcoin’s formal consensus rules remain unchanged. It must also be judged by what this practical regime does to the goods those rules are supposed to secure. When the conditions of effective participation and resistance are disproportionately established by a few centres of power, three consequences follow: 1) self-sovereignty becomes formal—real but operationally weak; 2) freedom money becomes dependent upon institutional permission; and 3) the social capacity to defend sound money progressively weakens. While Core v30 did not abolish these goods, the process by which it was established—and the failure of BIP-110 resistance—revealed how they can be hollowed out while their names and formal guarantees remain.

The node-sovereignty distinction now becomes a monetary problem. When concentrated institutions determine the cost of refusal, self-sovereignty survives formally while its practical usefulness contracts. A person may still run Knots, preserve restrictive policy, or reject a future consensus rule—but if hashpower, liquidity, counterparties, and infrastructure move elsewhere, exercising that sovereignty may increasingly mean economic exclusion.

Core v30 might not have enlarged the four-million-weight-unit block limit and therefore did not, by itself, make node-running impossible. But the danger is cumulative: removing friction from non-monetary data use may increase how consistently existing block capacity is consumed, accelerate historical-chain growth, increase initial-sync bandwidth and validation burdens, pressure transaction fees, and make independent validation progressively less attractive to ordinary people. While pruned nodes reduce indefinite storage requirements, they must still download and validate the blockchain’s history.

So it is not that v30 immediately made independent validation impossible. It is that a system which treats increasing burdens on independent validation as an acceptable externality is eroding the material basis of the node sovereignty it continues to proclaim.

The erosion of self-sovereignty does not remain confined to node-running. To the extent that independent validation becomes less accessible, ordinary users become more dependent upon institutions not only to tell them what Bitcoin is, but also to transact with it.

Bitcoin’s character as freedom money depends upon more than a fixed supply. It requires the practical ability to transact and validate without institutional permission. Non-monetary data consumes the same scarce blockspace as payments, can make ordinary monetary use more expensive, may encourage greater dependence upon custodians or intermediated services, and imposes unwanted validation burdens upon participants who never chose to devote Bitcoin’s monetary ledger to carrying arbitrary data.

At the governance level, freedom money is endangered when dominant institutions can determine which uses the dominant software facilitates and normalizes, while dispersed users possess only a prohibitively costly exit. Bitcoin could preserve its present scarcity rules, at least for a time, while most people encounter it through exchanges, ETFs, custodians, regulated miners, and developer-selected defaults— while becoming less effective as freedom money. But if the practical power to defend those rules is also becoming more concentrated, even its continued character as sound money cannot simply be presumed.

It is important to distinguish monetary rules from the institutional conditions required to defend them. While Bitcoin remains “sound” under its current supply, issuance, and property rules—those rules do not preserve themselves. Their durability depends upon a culture and distribution of practical power capable of resisting future attempts to redefine Bitcoin’s purpose or monetary properties. The danger revealed by BIP-110 is therefore precedential and structural. If a concentrated institutional network can establish defaults, normalize commercial interests, marginalize dissent, enlist miner incentives, and then present the resulting alignment as neutral consensus, the same mechanism may later operate upon more fundamental questions. While a supply-limit change would likely face much greater technical and economic resistance, the social capacity to defend sound money is now weaker than Bitcoiners have been taught to believe, while the practical power upon which that defense depends is more concentrated than they realize.

Nothing argued here requires us to deny the following: 1) Core v30 changed policy rather than consensus; 2) BIP-110 introduced new consensus restrictions; 3) miners cannot make invalid blocks valid; 4) anyone remains free to run Knots or fork Core; 5) v30 did not increase Bitcoin’s maximum block weight; or 6) BIP-110 failed to assemble sufficient hashpower and economic coordination to make its enforcing branch viable. All six statements are true. But taken by themselves, they tell us what changed at the software and consensus levels, what remained formally possible, and what support became operationally visible—not the unequal conditions under which each side was required to make its position effective.

Nor does BIP-110’s defeat prove that its position was rejected by a majority of Bitcoin users. Observable signaling and the stalled enforcing chain measure only the support that became operationally effective—not what users actually judged. Some may have supported BIP-110 itself, or at least the restrictive direction it represented, but lacked the equipment, technical ability, time, confidence, or willingness to bear the risks required to make that preference visible. We therefore cannot infer from the outcome whether the underlying position had minority or majority support. We can establish only that its supporters failed to assemble the particular forms of power required to make their position govern.

But they did not enter a neutral field. Core v30 travelled through the existing channels of ordinary continuity, routine upgrading, established infrastructure, and institutional support. Those accepting the dominant default did not first have to organize themselves into a movement capable of making their acceptance economically effective; the infrastructure they already used did that for them. They were already moving along a paved road, while dissenters first had to build one merely to enter the contest.

Those resisting had to notice the change, understand its significance, adopt alternative software, accept technical and economic risks, and coordinate with enough miners, wallets, exchanges, businesses, liquidity, and counterparties to make their position operative. Note: They did not necessarily do all that, but it was necessary to gain a fighting chance. Acquiescence became effective through ordinary continuation; dissent counted only after being translated into technically competent, materially supported, and economically coordinated action. Much underlying opposition was therefore unlikely ever to become operationally visible.

This means that policy-default power shaped not only the outcome, but also the evidence by which that outcome would later be interpreted. The lack of sufficient visible resistance could be presented as evidence that little resistance existed, even though the same structure had filtered out much of the opposition before it could become visible. The resulting alignment could then be called consensus, when what had actually been demonstrated was that one side possessed the established channels through which its position became operative, while the other did not.

The field did not merely favor one side after the contest began. It helped determine who could enter the contest—and then treated the resulting imbalance as evidence of consensus.

BIP-110 failed as an activation effort. It did not obtain the hashpower and economic recognition necessary to sustain its enforcing chain and make its restrictions operative across the network. But it succeeded as a diagnostic test—and, more importantly, as a correction to an incomplete understanding of how Bitcoin’s safeguards work.

It separated the power to refuse from the power to make that refusal economically effective. Individual users could reject Core v30, preserve a different policy locally, and signal their loss of trust by moving to Knots. But node count alone could not supply the hashpower, liquidity, counterparties, and economic recognition required to make that refusal govern a functioning monetary network. While validation sovereignty remained, the network and economic sovereignty required to carry it did not automatically follow.

Hodlonaut’s investigation supplied the upstream explanation; BIP-110 supplied the downstream test. The Network, The Lever, and The Merge documented how recruitment, funding, review, merge access, commercial relationships, moderation, and narrative formation could concentrate practical influence without establishing one secret controller. BIP-110 then revealed what that concentration meant when people attempted effective resistance: the dominant implementation could change Bitcoin’s practical direction through established channels, while its opponents were forced toward the radically higher threshold of consensus enforcement.

This changes the threat model. Bitcoiners were trained to watch for someone openly seizing the protocol while overlooking the slower concentration of the institutions that determine what becomes ordinary, supported, profitable, and practically difficult to resist. The familiar safeguards—run your own node; miners cannot change validity; anyone can fork; rules without rulers—remain. But BIP-110 proved that they are not self-executing.

Consensus rules establish Bitcoin’s outer boundaries; policy establishes much of the inherited operative normal within them. Because policy shapes infrastructure, investment, revenue, developer priorities, user habits, and expectations, a default that persists can condition the field of a later consensus struggle before that struggle visibly begins.

Bitcoin has therefore not been shown to be fully captured. But crucial parts of its everyday operative order—development, funding, review, merge access, policy defaults, mining, infrastructure, economic recognition, and narrative formation—are already shaped by a small number of interconnected centres of power. The citadel has not fallen, but many of the roads leading to it are controlled.

Nor did v30 irreparably destroy Bitcoin as sound money, as it did not alter the supply schedule or increase the maximum block weight. But it inflicted a different kind of damage, as it established a precedent by which the dominant implementation could change Bitcoin’s monetary direction at the policy layer, allow ordinary continuity to carry that change forward, and then require opponents to assemble an extraordinary technical and economic coalition merely to prevent the new default from becoming normal. While the policy remains reversible in code, the institutional interests, infrastructure, and expectations forming around it will not reverse themselves.

The lesson does not terminate in another general appeal to “support decentralization.” Another BIP-110 cannot simply begin where the first one began. It began with consensus-enforcement software before the mining and economic order capable of carrying its refusal had been assembled. Repeating that sequence upon the same unequal field would probably reproduce the same result. The next resistance must reverse the order of operations.

The immediate task is to build a rival operative monetary stack on the existing Bitcoin chain. A durable and independently maintained Knots-based implementation should supply the restrictive policy default. Physical miners should construct their own block templates from those nodes through DATUM or Stratum V2, rather than receive templates chosen by a handful of pools. This would join the user’s power to refuse to the power that actually constructs blocks—the connection BIP-110 lacked.

The measure of progress must therefore change. Listening-node counts, downloads, signaling statements, and social-media support do not establish readiness. The relevant evidence is how much physical hashpower is demonstrably constructing blocks from the alternative policy, which wallets and businesses actually transact through it, which exchanges have tested it, and whether sufficient liquidity and counterparties would remain if enforcement produced another split.

No new activation height should be announced until the enforcing side can survive the event it is asking users to enter. It should possess multiple independently maintained implementations, audited consensus code, miner-controlled block construction, enough committed hashpower to keep its chain moving through the inherited difficulty period, and economic services that have already tested deposits, withdrawals, replay protection, and chain-split procedures. The resistance must first prove that an operative monetary network exists before asking ordinary users to risk entering it.

Only then should a narrower and technically reconsidered successor to BIP-110 be attempted. Miner signaling could be offered first, with a user-activated soft fork held as the delayed fallback if an already demonstrated economic coalition were being obstructed by pools. Mandatory enforcement must be the culmination of assembled power—not an experiment conducted to discover whether that power exists.

A change to proof of work belongs behind that line. It could be justified only if a sufficiently assembled and identifiable economic coalition had already chosen the enforcing rules and the incumbent mining industry were deliberately starving or attacking its chain. Used before such a coalition exists, a PoW change does not restore Bitcoin; it creates another coin and hopes that Bitcoin’s liquidity, recognition, infrastructure, and users will follow. BIP-110’s defeat showed why hope is insufficient: the road must already carry nodes, hashpower, wallets, liquidity, and economic activity before anyone announces the fork.

That restorative path does not require BIP-110 to be revived exactly as written. Its technical rules, activation mechanism, safety assumptions, and temporary restrictions may all require reconsideration. But it is necessary to preserve the judgment that produced it: Bitcoin’s monetary end must govern how the system is used and developed. Consensus permission establishes what the network presently allows, but it does not make every profitable use of blockspace equally consonant with the kind of money Bitcoin exists to be.

Can Bitcoiners accept the v30 policy normal while continuing to describe Bitcoin as sound money, freedom money, and self-sovereign money? Not without contradicting those ends. But v30 does not immediately abolish the twenty-one-million limit or prevent anyone from holding private keys. The contradiction lies in accepting the mechanism it established as normal: calling Bitcoin self-sovereign while a dominant implementation can establish its practical direction before affirmative consent is demonstrated; calling it freedom money while dissenters retain the formal right to refuse but face extraordinary barriers to making that refusal effective; and calling it sound money while profitable use and institutional continuity displace Bitcoin’s monetary end as the governing criterion of development.

Refusing that normal does not require panic, nor does it require pretending that BIP-110 succeeded. It requires rebuilding the operative means that its failure revealed were missing. Let us be realistic and set the slogans aside: Bitcoin does not—and cannot—abolish human governance. Software must be written and maintained, blocks constructed, defaults selected, capital supplied, dissent made visible, and the recognized chain economically sustained. Bitcoin’s real achievement is to disperse these governing functions and deny any one actor formal authority to command the whole. But that dispersal remains practically real only while no aligned network acquires overwhelming control over the channels through which policy becomes default, blocks are constructed, software is maintained, dissent becomes visible, and economic recognition is assigned.

Bitcoiners have far too long taken refuge in slogans and absolutes. It is time to face reality: Bitcoin will always involve human governance, but its governing powers must be kept genuinely dispersed and mutually constrained.

The defeat of BIP-110 therefore cannot honestly be celebrated as an uncomplicated triumph of decentralized consensus. One side changed the dominant policy default and allowed existing infrastructure to carry that change forward. The other had to build an alternative technical and economic order merely to resist—and its inability to do so was then presented as proof that the new normal had been freely chosen.

Bitcoin is not yet fully captured. But the next struggle over self-sovereignty, censorship resistance, or even monetary supply will not begin on neutral ground if the institutions that establish the practical normal remain concentrated.

Traditional Catholics may recognize in the present Bitcoin dispute three familiar ways of responding when the institutions through which something is ordinarily preserved and carried forward begin directing it away from its proper end.

The comparison is only analogical. Bitcoin is not the Church: it has no divine constitution, indefectibility, or divinely established authority. We are only comparing the structure of the responses—not equating the two crises or using a Church-crisis label to decide a Bitcoin argument. Nevertheless, a similar practical question arises in both: What should one do when the recognized operative order remains in place but begins acting against the end it exists to serve?

The first response is the new-settlement position. In the Church, this resembles the “conservative” or Ecclesia Dei accommodation to the post-Conciliar order, where abuses are somewhat acknowledged and Tradition is “preserved” where permitted, but always within the very settlement that displaced it. Hence, what came before is reduced to an exception requiring permission.

Its Bitcoin equivalent accepts Core v30’s changed policy direction as the new governing settlement. Core and mining concentration may still be criticized, but once BIP-110 fails to reverse the change, its failure is treated as proof that Bitcoin worked as designed. The change itself passed through the new settlement; only the attempted restoration was required to demonstrate extraordinary consensus.

The second response begins from the opposite side of the same false choice: if the recognized order is gravely compromised, it can no longer be the real thing. In the Church, this structurally resembles sedevacantism. The contradiction between the man publicly recognized as pope and the office is resolved by concluding that he does not truly occupy it; authentic continuity must therefore be sought outside the presently recognized structure.

Its Bitcoin equivalent concludes that the recognized chain has become so compromised that authentic Bitcoin must continue on the stalled BIP-110 branch, with a change in proof of work if necessary. This position correctly perceives that formal node sovereignty can become operationally weak when a concentrated mining industry prevents the enforcing chain from moving. But it risks resolving the contradiction too quickly by declaring practical continuity with authentic Bitcoin after leaving behind most of Bitcoin’s existing liquidity, infrastructure, counterparties, and economic recognition. It may preserve the preferred rules while producing a technically functioning remnant that the wider monetary economy regards as another coin. It therefore risks becoming revolutionary in the very act of attempting restoration: it preserves the preferred rules by creating a new monetary order outside the recognized Bitcoin economy. This is the opposite side of the same false choice—accept the new settlement, or break practical continuity in order to escape it.

But there is a third response, which recognizes the reality of institutional concentration but continues to resist it—without pretending that the recognized outcome proves all is well or concluding that the recognized chain has ceased to be Bitcoin. This broadly resembles recognize and resist in response to a Church in crisis.

In the Church, recognize and resist does not end in private criticism. The Church remains the Church, but preserving Tradition requires seminaries, chapels, schools, publications, priests, and an entire practical order capable of carrying it through the crisis. Likewise, running Knots is necessary but not enough. Bitcoiners must build an alternative operative order joining independent development, nodes, miner-controlled block construction, wallets, businesses, liquidity, exchanges, and counterparties before another consensus confrontation begins.

Our conclusion therefore rejects both institutional acquiescence and immediate rupture. Bitcoin remains Bitcoin, but that does not mean its present operative order is sound. The answer is neither to treat the institutional outcome as self-authenticating nor to create another chain and hope an economy follows. It is to recognize what remains, resist what contradicts Bitcoin’s monetary end, and rebuild the practical order through which that resistance can become effective.

A proof-of-work change may eventually have a place—but as an emergency instrument protecting a sufficiently assembled and identifiable economic coalition capable of surviving the break, not as a substitute for assembling one.

Traditional Catholics will recognize the governing principle: recognition without resistance becomes acquiescence, while resistance without recognition becomes rupture. The difficult position is to preserve both truths—and then build what is necessary to make that position survive in practice.

Matthew Kratter’s analysis (here and here) identifies something important: if a small number of mining pools can starve an enforcing chain, running one’s own node is not enough. Hence, changing proof of work appears to be the cleanest answer, as it would allow the BIP-110 chain to begin moving again without permission from the present SHA-256 mining establishment.

But how to make a chain produce blocks is just one concern. It is also crucial to ensure that a monetary community moves with it. While a proof-of-work change can provide blocks, it cannot by itself provide users, wallets, businesses, exchanges, liquidity, counterparties, or recognition as Bitcoin. If attempted before those things exist, we may free the preferred rules from the present mining pools only to produce a technically functioning chain that the wider economy treats as another coin. The effort at restoration would then risk becoming rupture.

The better course is to remain with the recognized Bitcoin chain while resisting immediately and deliberately building the practical means of resistance: independent development, Knots nodes, miners constructing their own blocks, compatible wallets, businesses, exchanges, liquidity, and an identifiable economic community prepared to act together. This coalition need not be complete before the next confrontation, but it must be sufficiently assembled to survive the event it is asking people to enter. It cannot be improvised after the enforcing chain has already stalled.

A proof-of-work change should therefore remain available—but as an emergency instrument protecting that sufficiently assembled coalition, not as a substitute for building it. Matthew has correctly identified the immediate trap. This proposal begins from his diagnosis and asks the next question: not merely how do we escape the present mining establishment, but how do we make sure that, if such a break becomes necessary, a sufficient part of Bitcoin’s monetary economy moves with us?

At the same time, we realize the grave danger—the longer the present order remains operative, the more it can become entrenched: Core’s changed default becomes the “default” “normal”: wallets, businesses, miners, and new applications adapt themselves to it; economic interests arise that benefit from the new policy; BIP-110’s defeat is gradually converted from an institutional outcome into supposed proof of legitimacy; and/ or opposition loses urgency, fragments, or becomes accustomed to merely protesting. The innovation therefore possesses a compounding advantage: it can build upon an already functioning Bitcoin economy, while the restoration side must construct alternatives from the ground up. The great asymmetry compounds over time.

But that does not mean an immediate proof-of-work change is necessarily the answer. It could eliminate the mining obstacle while handing the recognized Bitcoin economy completely to the present order. The restoring side might escape institutional capture only by removing itself from the very economy it hoped to restore.

There are therefore dangers on both sides: Wait too long, and the new settlement becomes difficult to reverse. Move too soon, and the restoring community may separate itself from Bitcoin before it possesses the means to carry Bitcoin’s economy with it. Restoration would then abandon the very ground it set out to recover.

The solution must therefore be simultaneous resistance and construction, not construction first and resistance later: 1) Resist immediately: run Knots, preserve restrictive policy, support miners constructing their own templates, challenge the claim that BIP-110’s defeat settled the substantive question, and refuse to normalize every new development built upon the changed policy; 2) Build urgently: connect nodes, developers, physical miners, wallets, businesses, exchanges, liquidity, and counterparties into an identifiable coalition with concrete milestones—not an indefinite aspiration; 3) Prepare the emergency instrument now: develop and test the proof-of-work contingency, migration procedure, software, and economic coordination before it is needed, without necessarily activating it immediately; and 4) Establish a threshold for action: the coalition should know beforehand what further change or degree of entrenchment would justify coordinated enforcement or a proof-of-work change.

And let’s be realistic: this requires money. Independent development, security audits, mining infrastructure, wallet and exchange integration, and sufficient liquidity cannot be built or sustained indefinitely by volunteers alone. Those who believe this effort is necessary must therefore begin identifying people, businesses, miners, and funding institutions willing to finance it. But that support must be diversified and structured so that no single benefactor or institution can acquire the very power of direction that the alternative is being built to resist. The immediate object of reform is not Bitcoin’s monetary rules, but the human and institutional order through which Bitcoin is developed, funded, mined, and made economically operative.

The governing principle is this: the answer is neither to wait passively while the the new settlement consolidates nor to rupture before the means of restoration exist. We must resist now, build urgently, and prepare the emergency instrument in parallel. The concrete question is what must be done now so that decisive action later remains possible. We should neither allow ourselves to be drive away nor mistake continued presence for effective resistance. We must hold the ground, build the means, and be ready to act.