Why is no one in charge of bitcoin?
An open world money based on rules without rulers and why that's better.
No one is in charge of bitcoin…
There is no bitcoin company or CEO, no figurehead or marketing department to tell you all about the cool things coming up.
Its OK to find this very confusing, because, it is very very confusing.
Instead bitcoin exists through the coordination of a broad set of slightly intense volunteers from all around the world who have decided to build a new economy on this open internet money.
Perhaps this is a good thing though?
I believe it’s a good thing no-one is in charge, as money itself is too important.
Money is one half of every transaction on the planet.
As such if you were in control of the money you would have undue control over every commercial human interaction on the planet.
Currently we attempt to solve this by placing central banks1 in charge of the money and hoping they turn out to be the most morally heroic individuals the world has ever seen.2
I like to call this the Lord of the Rings fallacy, in which we lay all of he problems of a society at the feet of the bad king and assume that the answer to this is a good king.
"once Aragorn gets in we’ll have 1000 years of glory - hopefully”
“Unless he’s a dick like that last guy….”
The problem is of course, that even the most morally good people can become corrupted by power.
Some people might say, that giving a small group of individuals oversight of every commercial human interaction on the planet might even be approaching too much power.
“All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” - Lord Acton.
We could imagine for instance particular groups being de-platformed from the banking systems, political opponents being targeted or simply punishing people and blocking transactions for wrong think.
The simple reason Bitcoin was designed with no leader is to avoid this problem.
Over a long enough time horizon the fate of bitcoin will be to become the default reserve currency of the internet, a network which itself is fast becoming the dominant economy on the planet touching the lives of all people on the planet.
It would never make sense for that system to be owned by a small select group of privileged people3.
Instead bitcoin elects to move forwards with no leader, allowing the enterprise to be owned by no one, or everyone depending on your viewpoint.
Each person that elects to follow the rules of the bitcoin network that have been the same since 3rd January 2009 can use it and trade with anyone else.
Yes it makes things hard and confusing.
It’s slightly awkward to follow along, unfamiliar and we can’t get someone up on the TV to tell us whats going on!
But, what we get in return for this is a truly open and equitable system of money that we can build upon knowing that it can never discriminate and will be fair for all4.
I think that is something worth fighting for.
Fun tidbit, central banks are often not government organizations but privately held banking committees - most famously the US Federal Reserve is neither federal or reserved :)
I’ll refrain from going off topic here, but feel free to search for recent examples of FED chairs insider trading or controversy around politicians stock options trading on indiser information.
Be they a single national government, an un-elected group of bankers or a silicon valley hedge fund.
Please be aware this is a property of bitcoin specifically because of a massive focus on decentralization - we’ll get into this more later - this isn’t a property you get for free simply because you are a “cryptocurrency” or use a blockchain - it is hugely frustrating and unfortunate that this point is not more widely understood, but hopefully we’ll get this across through this blog!