Trustless Systems vs. Top-Down Control

What makes Bitcoin so powerful is exactly what our current political systems are missing:

a trustless, self-regulating environment.

Bitcoin doesn’t need gatekeepers to decide what’s good or bad, what has value or doesn’t.

It runs on clear, simple rules — enforced by consensus and the fee market.

If a transaction follows the rules and pays the fee, it belongs.

No moral judgment. No authority filtering it. No exceptions.

That’s a huge contrast to the world we live in — where governments get involved in everything,

telling us what’s “safe,” what’s “true,” and what we’re allowed to say or do.

They claim it’s for our own protection.

But what they’re really doing is trying to control the flow of truth, ideas, and behavior.

They treat us like children:

“You can’t be trusted to self-regulate. Let us decide for you.”

But here’s the reality:

What they call “hate speech” only becomes a real crisis when they amplify it — through their media, their platforms, their algorithms.

If left alone, most of it dies out on its own.

Society already knows how to filter what it doesn’t accept.

We do it every day — on the street, in our families, in our communities.

We don’t need a “Ministry of Speech” telling us what words are too dangerous to hear.

Bitcoin was built on the same idea:

Open systems work best when they’re free to self-regulate.

Not when they’re ruled by fear or filtered by someone else’s standards.

So when developers or node operators start acting like authorities — labeling valid transactions as “spam,” deciding what “belongs” on the network,

trying to draw moral lines around Bitcoin — they’re not protecting the protocol.

They’re importing the exact same top-down thinking Bitcoin was designed to escape.

Bitcoin isn’t a moral playground.

It’s a neutral, trustless protocol.

It lets everyone in, even the ones you don’t agree with.

That’s the whole point.

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Discussion

Deciding what transactions to accept and forward on *your own node* is the definition of self-regulation.

No - that’s you regulating your view of the network.

Bitcoin self-regulates through consensus and fees.

That’s the only form of self-regulation that matters at the protocol level.

Everything else is shadow-censorship and if enough nodes adopt the same filters, it stops being personal choice and starts becoming de facto control.

That's why Tolerant Minority matters.

Nonsense. If I as an individual decide not to listen to you, that is not censorship. No one else has a right to use my physical resources in ways I don't consent to.

Yes but that is not self-regulation of Bitcoin. That is not consensus and fees based trust less self regulation.

This is you regulating your node, applying tour own filters.

And those tx's still end up in your own node once they get included in a block — even if you initially filtered them.

In short:

You can’t keep them out forever — unless you fork.

So what's the problem? I use the standard core v29 filters/standardness rules, why should I need to change them. I haven't heard any compelling reason.

I don't have a problem. Just told you your understanding of self regulating mechanisms on bitcoin are wrong and in the end you filter shit because those tx's once mined still end up in your node.

Do what you wish with your node.

And I'm saying your wrong. Individuals deciding what software to run and how to configure that software is the only way Bitcoin can possibility self regulate, there is no other way - whether it's consensus rules or mempool policy.

Then you don't understand what self regulating mechanism is my friend. The name says it all: self regulating.

The only true, protocol level, self regulation in bitcoin is consensus and fees.

Why did we have filters for so long. Did individuals decide to change that or was that a nuetral happening?

Looks like we end up having to trust a little bit.

We all have the same tools. If you’re asking why Core made changes like relaxing relay limits on OP_RETURN, go read the actual discussions. This didn’t happen overnight — it’s been openly debated for years. But those debates happen in the places where devs build, not on Twitter or Nostr.”

• Bitcoin Core PRs & Issues:

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pulls

https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues

• Mailing List (Bitcoin Dev):

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/

• IRC Logs (Technical meetings):

https://bitcoincore.reviews/

You people complain and claim that bitcoin core did not communicate this right. As a node runner if you want to participate in bitcoin development you need to be where discussions happen.

People love Bitcoin for being decentralized — until it feels inconvenient.

Then suddenly they expect devs to ‘explain themselves,’ like it’s a subscription service.

Bitcoin is an open protocol, not a company. If you want to understand it, show up where it’s built. Nobody owes you a push notification.

My point is bitcoin is people and requires trust.

If the people of bitcoin don't care, it will change into something else.

Its not strictly code. Human emotion, incentives, and intentions matter.

But people care and changes on protocol level take ages to go through. That's the beauty of consensus of node runners.