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Bitcoin isn’t as alien to history as people like to imagine. Strip away the tech, and what you’ve got is a very old story: a distributed base of power resisting central authorities that try to tighten their grip. The novelty is that Bitcoin encodes this struggle in math and software rather than flesh and law.

A few parallels:

• The Reformation (16th c.) – The Catholic Church was the “Core devs”: centralized, with a monopoly on defining truth. Luther and the printing press were the “Knots nodes”: suddenly ordinary believers could circulate pamphlets and enforce their own interpretations. The Church fought back, splintered, lost dominance, but didn’t disappear. Bitcoin has the same “printing press moment” baked in: you can fork the code, and if enough people run it, the cathedral loses ground.

• The English Civil War / Glorious Revolution (17th c.) – Monarchs claimed divine right (analogous to Core’s “we are the maintainers”). Parliament and local militias said: “we’ll run our own system, thanks.” Through messy conflict and power shifts, sovereignty was redistributed. Bitcoin nodes mirror that: they don’t just protest—they enforce.

• The American Revolution (18th c.) – Colonists rejected imperial overreach, even though Britain had the stronger navy, money, and bureaucracy. Decentralized militias and colonies coordinated to resist taxation and rule-making. The UASF in 2017 was the Boston Tea Party of Bitcoin: no taxation without representation, no blocksize increase without node consensus.

The difference is Bitcoin doesn’t rely on bullets or pamphlets but on incentives and hashpower. Yet the dynamics rhyme: concentrated authority always tries to centralize; distributed actors always push back; the outcome is never the total triumph of either, but a rough equilibrium.

You’re right that history tilts toward authorities winning—they have armies, money, bureaucracy. But Bitcoin bends the game because here the “army” (miners) can’t overrule the villagers (nodes) if the villagers coordinate on the rules of entry. The software removes the usual weapons of coercion.