Ten years later, a group of regulars asks the town for reserved hours. They are good players and they show up every night. Their plan would make the games smoother for them. It would also mean a kid who walks up with a ball might wait a week to get on the court.
I want to talk about that kind of fight. A founding principle is a rule a system starts with, before anyone has grown big inside it. Bitcoin has a few. Anyone can run a node, which is a computer that checks every transaction against the rules. Anyone can plug in a miner, the machine that adds new blocks. And anyone can check the full ledger, the public record of every payment ever made.
I sort rules into two kinds. A setting can change and the system stays itself, like the score a game plays to on that court. A property is part of what the system is, like the fact that anyone can call next. When people argue for years about a change, I look at whether it touches a setting or a property. A long fight over a property usually means the original design is doing its job.
Now the strong case against me. Founders get things wrong. Holding on to day one rules can protect the people who got in early and block fixes that would help millions of newcomers. Plenty of networks improved by changing what looked like a core rule, and some of Bitcoin's own upgrades were good ones.
I take that seriously, so here is how I would know I am wrong. If a network changed one of its founding properties, like who is allowed to join, and five years later more independent people were checking and building on it than before, I would rethink this whole view.
Until I see that, I keep the court rule in mind. On Bitcoin, the open doors were there from the first block, and everyone who came later built around them. Those are the rules I want protected.
if this changed how you read the next Bitcoin argument, Zap ⚡
