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As an American, I was raised to believe that "Democracy" was the pinnacle of good government. Never mind that the United States was set up as a Constitutional Republic, with many safeguards placed specifically to limit the negative effects of Democratic levers. We are encouraged to worship at the feet of Mob Rule. And Monarchy, well, we all know it is strictly evil, right? Hans-Hermann Hoppe's <i>Democracy: The God That Failed</i>, argues persuasively that Monarchy is actually preferable to Democracy, largely because elected officials do not have as much skin-in-the-game and are incentivized to think and act with high time preference (short-term thinking) as opposed to a king who sees the national resources as his property to protect and nurture. But what if the king is a tyrant? The monarch is supported by a family and royal court which would have the means and motivation to depose a king whose abuses became unbearable. Given enough abuse, regicide will be carried out by a conspiracy of the inner circle or even a sole individual close enough to slip a knife into the king's back. This is historical fact. Let's now turn to Bitcoin. A lot of vitriol has been thrown at Luke Dashjr over Knots and BIP-110. Many who claim to hate spam and JPEGs on Bitcoin stop short of supporting BIP-110 because of arguments <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/JP_Technology/status/2072175303510970404" color="blue">like this one</a>:
> "I'm not under any illusions Core is perfect. But, however well charges against them hold up, switching Bitcoin's reference implementation over to a SOLO DEV project, especially when it's led by someone of questionable mental health, would be disastrous!"
Solo dev. Questionable mental health. Disastrous consequences.
## The man with "questionable mental health"
I have never met Luke in-person, but I have engaged with him online. He strikes me as both highly intelligent and highly autistic, which is not surprising given he is a genius-level C++ developer. For example, I've gone back and forth with him about his beliefs concerning Catholicism. I'm likely on the spectrum myself, so I understand him probably better than most. Autistic types tend to have trouble seeing things from the perspective of other people, and that is often where his argumentation can be off-putting. For example, rather than just stating that he's part of a small sect of Catholics who believe the majority of the Catholic Church (including the Pope) are not real Catholics, he engages in circuitous arguments that sound a lot like the No True Scotsman fallacy. From my vantage point as a Protestant Christian, he seems to have much more in common with Protestants and Martin Luther (who was a Catholic priest with the goal of reforming the Catholic Church) than not, but he doesn't see it that way and seems highly offended if you make such a suggestion. If you understand that he doesn't mean "Catholic" like most people understand it, then you start to see that his logic is internally consistent. Here is how <a target="_blank" href="https://dashjr.org/" color="blue">Luke's own bio</a> opens:
> "I am first and foremost a Roman Catholic. This is not to be confused with the heretics and pedos who have taken over Vatican City; Leo XIV & his entire sect are NOT Catholics."
He's not crazy. He's just obtuse. His own bio says it plainly: "MBTI classifies my personality as INTP. (I'm not actually being a jerk, that part is your perception only. Meet up with me in person sometime and you'll understand.)" A temperament that will not soften a premise to win an argument will also not merge a bad patch to win approval. Judge Luke by his code, his review record, and fifteen-plus years of not being wrong about Bitcoin's failure modes. On that record, Luke is the longest still-active Bitcoin Core developer alive. Dismissing him as "crazy" is intellectually lazy.
## Bitcoin is not a democracy
The people warning about a Knots “takeover” want you to imagine a coup.
Bitcoin does not work that way. You do not vote in Bitcoin. You run software. Every node enforces the rules unilaterally, and the network's rules are simply the overlap of what all those nodes accept. Nobody can loosen or tighten that by winning a popularity contest. Nobody can force you to run their client. Nobody can vote your node into accepting invalid garbage.
That is the whole point.
“Democratizing” Bitcoin development to make it more "inclusive" sounds noble, but it is also an attack surface. Majorities can be manufactured. Sentiment can be bought. Dissenting voices can be censored. Sock puppets are cheap. Corporate money is patient. This hostile takeover of Core has been <a target="_blank" href="https://www.citadel21.com/the-network" color="blue">carefully documented by Hodlonaut</a> and you need to understand it. Node enforcement is different. You either run the code or you do not. Network consensus is emergent. Be wary of anyone claiming to know what the majority of Bitcoiners believe or want.
## The intolerant minority wins
Nassim Taleb wrote the definitive essay on this: <a target="_blank" href="https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15" color="blue">The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority</a>. Less than half a percent of Americans keep kosher, yet nearly every drink on the shelf is kosher certified. Why? The kosher buyer will not bend, the other 99% do not care, so the market quietly reorganizes around the inflexible few.
Bitcoin already ran this experiment.
In 2017, miners had stonewalled SegWit for months. A minority of users responded with BIP-148, a user-activated soft fork. Beginning August 1, their nodes would reject any block that did not signal SegWit. No permission requested. No majority claimed.
How large was this army? Smaller than people remember. The UASF Node Tracker, built on node data from Bitnodes, shows BIP-148 signaling nodes hovering between <a target="_blank" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170817184322im_/https://uasf.saltylemon.org/uasf_percent_all.png" color="blue">6% and 13% of all reachable nodes</a> from April through late July. A <a target="_blank" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170612155417im_/http://uasf.saltylemon.org/uasf_percent_all.png" color="blue">June 12 snapshot</a> reads 11.51%. Contemporary reporting in late July counted 1,095 UASF nodes out of 7,896 reachable, under 14%.
Roughly one node in eight, at its peak. And it still won. Faced with a credible threat to the sale value of their blocks, miners capitulated before the deadline arrived. BIP-91 locked in on July 20, 2017 and began enforcement around July 23, making August 1 a non-event. SegWit itself locked in weeks later and went live on August 24.
The minority never had to fire the gun.
I remember that August well, though for the wrong reasons. I was in Zurich pitching a crypto index fund to an accelerator, a finance guy fresh off four years brokering precious metals with Schiff Gold, certain I was building the new Nasdaq. Wrong about the broader "crypto" market but right about keeping Bitcoin blocks small, I sold my BCH. I'll save that story for another article. The point stands either way: a proactive, inflexible minority with skin in the game beats an indifferent majority.