Then somebody proposed an amendment process.
By the third season the rulebook ran eleven pages. Nobody read it. Three guys knew it cold, and those three won every argument about lineups, forfeits and rainouts for years. They never cheated. They knew where the levers were, and the rest of us did not.
I think about that league when people talk about governance in digital money. Governance is the process a system uses to change its own rules. Some systems make that easy on purpose. Holders of a token, meaning the units that carry voting power, cast votes, the vote passes, and the rules update. Supporters call this upgradeable, meaning the system can be repaired without everyone having to agree to start over.
The claim I keep coming back to is this. The more a system lets its governance change, the more governance becomes the thing worth attacking. If a vote can move fees, freeze balances, or hand over a contract, meaning a program that holds other people's money, then capturing that vote is worth as much as everything the vote can reach. Turnout tends to be low, often a few percent of holders. A majority of whoever showed up is enough.
The other side deserves a fair hearing, and it is strong. A system that cannot change cannot fix a bug. When something breaks at scale, flexible governance is how you patch it in a week instead of splitting the community in half. People asking for adaptable rules have watched rigid systems fail to repair obvious mistakes, and they are asking for something sensible.
What would show me wrong is this. Give these systems a few more years and count two things. How often did a flexible governance system have its rules changed against what ordinary holders wanted, and how often did a rigid one fail to fix something that cost people money. A named case, an amount, a date.
Bitcoin gets no exemption. Its rules are hard to change, which is the property I want, and it still has politics. Fights over block space, meaning how much room each batch of transactions gets, are politics. Most blocks today are built by a few mining pools, meaning the groups miners join to smooth out their income, and that is worth watching rather than treating as settled.
The thin rulebook had one property it took me years to name. Three guys could never learn it better than everybody else, because there was nothing extra to learn.
if this made you go look at who votes on your money, Zap ⚡