How Bitcoin's developers have failed the community
This will not be a technical post, I can eventually write one on the specifics of how Bitcoin's developers have weakened Bitcoinβs sovereign / monetary (MoE) use.
In this post, I'll cover the predictable chaos that developer have caused.
99% of users should have never had to know what OP_RETURN is β and the fact they do means Bitcoin's developers have failed the community.
The fact that non-technical users have had to learn about these details is a massive failure on the part of the developers.
Now you have users taking sides on a soft-fork debate purely based on their blind faith in influencers without understanding the technicalities.
When UX abstraction fails, politics invades the base layer:
- Money that requires protocol literacy isn't money yet. If non-technical holders must parse mempool policy, witness discounts, inscription hacks, or soft-fork signaling to judge existential risk, you've leaked governance from experts to the masses without giving them power β just anxiety.
- Abstraction debt. Bitcoin's developers are no longer shipping "safe defaults". That created a vacuum where influencers do protocol comms, and users pick tribes by vibes.
- Legitimacy hazard. The minute regulars think "the rules can shift under me", your store-of-value narrative becomes contingent on whoever writes/merges code, not on time. That's a reputational tax that compounds.
In the Bitcoin ecosystem (developers, miners/pools, exchanges/custodians, state/regulators), no actor with power is optimizing for "simple, sovereign Medium-of-Exchange for the masses". They optimize for revenue, deniability, and policy compatibility.
All of this chaos and retail anxiety caused by developers will lead more people to ETFs/custody adoption and will lessen self-custody and MoE use.
If node policy changes keep enabling more and easier illegal payloads, pressure lands on runners/miners first.
Captured developers is the most asymmetric attack vector - it hits sovereign users hardest, while leaving institutional wrappers unaffected.
Developers have to start treating Bitcoin's users as stakeholders, not an audience they have contempt for.
The only way out of this is for the users to start working on a rough draft of constraints that should be imposed on the developers.
I might write a very rough version eventually.
