Sounds fair. Each person gets a vote. And the roof leaks for three years.
Start with how this works. Every open money network has to decide how it changes. Not the money itself, the rules of the money: how big a batch of transactions can be, how fees work, what counts as valid. That decision process is called governance. Some networks write it down formally, with votes and councils and published procedure. Others leave it informal, where a change happens because enough people running the software agree to run a new version.
The formal version looks better on paper. You can read the rules. You can see who voted.
My claim is that formal governance adds a surface that can be attacked. Once there is a vote, there is a thing to capture. Whoever can buy influence, or organize faster, or just show up when nobody else does, gets to steer. And because the process is legitimate, whatever comes out of it carries authority that is hard to argue with. Complexity slows a network down, and it also creates new places to apply pressure.
The counterargument deserves real room, because it is strong. Informal governance carries its own cost: nothing is written down. Power sits with whoever has been around longest and whoever maintains the code. Those people answer to nobody, and you cannot vote them out, because there is no vote. A newcomer cannot even find out how a decision gets made. Calling that freedom is generous. It can just as easily be an old boys club with no minutes.
So what would show me wrong. If networks with formal on chain governance run several years of contested votes that change something real, with no measurable capture by concentrated holders, and participation that stays broad instead of collapsing to a handful of large accounts, then the extra machinery is doing its job and my worry was misplaced.
Bitcoin's answer is to make changing the rules hard and to hand nobody a lever labeled decide. That is frustrating. It is also why a roof that has not leaked in fifteen years has never needed a meeting.
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