How Bitcoin Will Prevail the Centralization Wars

Something weird is happening with Bitcoin. The centralization wars have reached a fever pitch, and yet the price of Bitcoin has remained stable in the low/mid-$400s. Late night on March 19th, 2016, after binge-reading essay after essay about the drama, I sold all my bitcoins, four years after I had bought it at $12. I simply asked myself, “If I didn’t already have this Bitcoin, would I buy it now?” But as I continued digging deeper, reading arguments for all sides, I put my money back in on March 27th. I took a 7% loss for my fear, as Bitcoin had gone up in that week, but in return, I now have a renewed understanding of why I’m in Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin drama has gone by different names. Before it was called “the blocksize debate” and now it’s called “Core vs. Classic,” but at the root of it all is the issue of centralization, so I’m calling it the centralization wars. Power in Bitcoin is centralizing, that’s clear, but it’s not clear how it should centralize in the future.

How did the conversation about Bitcoin become a conversation about centralization? In a way, the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 was a political statement on centralization. Satoshi designed it to avoid the corruption of state-run currencies by fixing monetary policy in the codebase. Furthermore, unlike state-run currencies, anybody could play the part of Treasury and create coins, so long as they had a fast computer to run the code.

But wherever there is money, there’s greed, and sooner or later, big players…