Fork You
How Bitcoin avoids oligarch capture
With Bitcoin, a revolution doesn’t require overthrowing the oligarchs. It simply requires copying some code and allowing people to choose their own freedom.
I recently spoke with a close friend. He often maintained that, regardless of US politics and our financial fragility, a revolution was not in our immediate future. In our last conversation, he expressed concern over Trump’s involvement with Bitcoin and crypto. He seemed to change that tune about revolution, “It’s time!” I explained to him that I believe the revolution has been underway since before Occupy Wall Street, but it is nothing like the party for Marie Antoinette; people were just losing their heads!
You know what’s weird about revolutions? Everyone expects them to look the same. Angry crowds, dramatic speeches, somebody’s head on a pike. Very theatrical. Very messy. Very… analog.
But here’s the thing, technology revolutions are more subtle, take time to gain momentum, and then… whoosh into the mainstream before you can say, “Let them eat cake.” The most effective revolutions are the ones the monopolies don’t even see coming. And they definitely don’t see coming a revolution that consists of… copying files. I once offered to start an MP3 business for Sony Music, but they turned down the idea, and gobble, gobble, gobble, just like that, Napster ate their lunch.
If we look at the roots of Bitcoin, it was developed as an escape from the existing system 16 years ago. Since then, it’s become a $2 trillion asset class on its way to becoming a new form of money and reinventing the global economy. Many people view recent moves by Trump, BlackRock, and corporate America as attempts to co-opt Bitcoin. Imagine! Oligarchs are seeking to capture what was designed as an escape from their monetary monopoly.
They call it “institutional adoption.” Isn’t that precious? Like Bitcoin was some stray puppy that finally found a good home with Goldman Sachs. “Oh look, the banks are adopting Bitcoin!” Yeah, the same banks that spent a decade calling it terrorist funding are now its loving foster parents. I’m crying tears of joy.
Here’s what kills me about these people: they want to control a system that was specifically designed not to be controlled. It’s like trying to tame fire by putting it in a filing cabinet. “We’ll just regulate this decentralized, permissionless network with our centralized, permission-based rules.” It’s the very definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect!
Anyone who lived through Bitcoin’s block size wars realizes that capturing the Bitcoin Network isn’t as easy as traditional financial types think it is. See, when your “hostile takeover” strategy is “please adopt our code,” people can just… not adopt your code. Radical revolutionary concept, I know.
The community simply chose a different code when there was substantial disagreement on how to move forward. No violence. No protests (some really nasty Reddit rants), but. Dramatic speeches about freedom, nope, just “Thanks for your input, we’ll be using this other version now.” Individual sovereignty won, but what really won was decentralized governance.
Think about that. Oligarchs are individuals who are accustomed to exerting control through force, regulation, institutional capture, and the threat of violence. And suddenly they’re dealing with a system where their greatest weapon is… a strongly worded GitHub comment!
So yeah, “Rules Without Rulers” has some teeth, and those teeth are growing. They started as baby teeth in 2009, and now those choppers are chewing on nation-states. Apparently, the Tooth Fairy doesn’t accept fiat currency.
Bitcoin is not a panacea, a silver bullet, or a utopian economy. It’s just a way to tell financial overlords “thanks, but we’ll handle our own money,” and actually mean it.
So, like my friend, some people are waiting for some dramatic revolution: barricades, pitchforks, the whole nine yards. Meanwhile, the actual revolution is happening in code repositories. “Sorry about your monetary monopoly, we just forked around and found an out.”
What Bitcoin does is remove the leverage of control from a small, narrowly defined oligarchy and return it to the market. Imagine having to actually compete for customers instead of just legislating away their alternatives. Oh, the absolute horror!
And the oligarchs’ greatest fear isn’t violence, protests, or angry mobs. Their greatest fear is irrelevance. Because you can’t regulate what you can’t control, and you can’t control what people can simply copy, modify, and choose to use instead.
Fork you, indeed.
