That is the cost of adding people to a decision, and it is the cost that gets left out of the pitch when someone proposes a new way to decide things.
Here is the setup. Bitcoin has almost no formal governance. There is no board, no shareholder vote, no council that can change the rules. A change gets written up as a proposal, called a BIP, and it happens only if the people running the software choose to run the new version. Nobody can make them.
Plenty of people look at that and call it broken. So let me show you what it cost.
Taproot was a change that made Bitcoin transactions cheaper to check and more private. The proposals were finished in January 2020. The change switched on in November 2021, at block 709,632. A block is one numbered page in the shared ledger, so that is a date the whole network could agree on in advance. Almost two years. Most of that time went to arguing about how to decide, rather than about the change itself. The answer they landed on, called Speedy Trial, gave miners, the people whose machines write those pages, three months to signal support. They cleared the bar in June 2021, and the change still waited five more months.
So here is my claim. Every decision-making body you add multiplies the ways a system can stall, and it multiplies the places where someone can take hold of it. A governance layer gets sold on what it lets you do. It gets priced as though coordinating were free. It lands on you if you hold any of it, because whoever can change the rules can change what you are holding.
The strongest case against me is a fair one. Informal governance only looks simpler. It is undocumented, it hands quiet power to whoever has been around the longest, and those people answer to nobody. A written process at least puts the power somewhere you can see it. Speedy Trial was itself a new mechanism, and it ended a deadlock that had run for years.
What would show me wrong: a network that keeps adding formal governance layers and measurably decides faster, with fewer fights about legitimacy, over five years or more.
I have run my own copy of the Bitcoin software since 2015. The only vote I hold is which version I run, and nobody has ever needed to count it.
if this made you think about who decides, Zap ⚡
