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- Bitcoin: Imperfect by design<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of CoinGeek.<\/em><\/p>\n
Perfection is the enemy of good. Voltaire said it, engineers live by it, and Bitcoin<\/a> proved it over a decade of forks, civil wars, and a thousand competing chains that each thought they had a better idea.<\/p>\n
- \n
- The costly risks of Bitcoin optimization<\/a><\/li>\n
- Harnessing commercial inertia<\/a><\/li>\n
- Why BSV governance model stands out<\/a><\/li>\n
- Turning disorder into strength<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
About two years ago, I wrote a piece for CoinGeek called \u201cThe beautiful imperfections of Bitcoin<\/a>,\u201d where I laid out the philosophical case that Bitcoin\u2019s apparent design flaws (race conditions for consensus, competitive mining instead of altruistic validation, lack of cryptographic finality, and the block reward schedule itself) were features. They were the mechanisms that forced human participation and created economic incentives strong enough to sustain a global network without a single CEO, board meeting, or product roadmap. That article was about the beauty of such imperfections.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This one is about the consequences.<\/p>\n
Because in the two years since, every chain that pursued \u201cperfection\u201d has paid the price for it, and every system that accepted its own imperfections and built anyway has gotten stronger than the critics predicted.<\/p>\n
The cost of optimization<\/strong><\/p>\n
Bitcoin was always \u201cgood.\u201d A well-engineered system optimizes for the most stable, scalable<\/a>, general-purpose rules, because optimizing for specific uses always comes at a cost of other variables. That\u2019s an engineering principle as old as bridge-building, and the entire history of the digital asset space is a lesson in what happens when you forget it.<\/p>\n
Every chain that exists today, from BTC to BCH to BSV<\/a> to the thousands of alts, exists because someone thought they could perfect something. BTC is optimized for lots of little nodes. BCH is optimized for community governance. Ethereum is optimized for programmability. Solana is optimized for speed. Each of them made trade-offs, and each of them broke something in the process that the original Bitcoin design<\/a> had actually gotten right.<\/p>\n
![\"bitcoins](\"https:\/\/coingeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/every-chain.webp\")
<\/figure>\nBTC\u2019s trade-offs<\/a>\u00a0are the ones I know best, and they\u2019re the most instructive. The small block camp \u201cwon\u201d the block size wars by arguing that everyone needed to run a node<\/a>, that decentralization meant maximizing the number of independent validators on consumer hardware. They got what they wanted. Tiny blocks. Tens of thousands of home nodes. And a system that has not disrupted a single person in finance, banking, or payments out of their job, which tells you everything about how well those trade-offs actually worked.<\/p>\n
Satoshi Nakamoto solved the Byzantine Generals problem<\/a> with Proof of Work<\/a> (PoW), then reintroduced Byzantine soldiers (home node operators) who second-guess the proof of work anyway. The whole point of Nakamoto consensus was that you don\u2019t need to trust anyone because the work speaks for itself, cryptographically. BTC\u2019s \u201cnode culture\u201d reintroduced trust requirements through the back door: trust the developers who issue the soft forks, and trust the Core repository maintainers who merge the code at conferences and mailing lists where \u201crough consensus\u201d gets manufactured behind closed doors.<\/p>\n
This created a de facto, developer-led oligarchy, which is actually controlled by Big Banks, Big Tech, and Big Gov. (I\u2019ve said this once or twice. Maybe a thousand times. At this point it\u2019s practically my ringtone.) Digital Currency Group takes investment from New York Life, CME Group (NASDAQ: CME<\/a>), and Mastercard (NASDAQ: MA<\/a>), while Reid Hoffman and Austin Hill raise money from Jeffrey Epstein and the rest of the PayPal Mafia (NASDAQ: PYPL<\/a>), and then fund the developers who change Bitcoin\u2019s protocol. Legacy payment companies are funding the development of the system designed to replace them.<\/p>\n
If that doesn\u2019t set off alarm bells, I genuinely don\u2019t know what would.<\/p>\n
![\"bitcoins](\"https:\/\/coingeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/btcs-security-budget.webp\")
<\/figure>\nThe deeper problem is that the pursuit of perfection made the capture possible in the first place. When you decide the protocol needs to change, you create a class of people who get to decide how it changes. You create politics<\/a>. And once you have politics, you have capture, because the imperfect protocol that nobody can change is more resistant to corruption than the \u201cimproved\u201d protocol that a committee controls.<\/p>\n
Back to the top \u2191<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
Commercial inertia is the real defense<\/strong><\/p>\n
Now for the uncomfortable part.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spent years arguing about governance structures, protocol stability, legal frameworks, and technical architecture. All of that matters. But the thing that keeps me up at night as a principled bitcoiner is this: more than boards, organizations, contracts, or law, the most important thing for victory is commercial inertia, and the sooner the BSV ecosystem<\/a> internalizes that, the sooner things change.<\/p>\n
Having lots of customers, lots of liquidity, and lots of turnover is actually the best way to be resilient against all the other risks that exist in competitive, distributed systems. The best way to mitigate the influence of everyone and anyone else is to be able to say: \u201cI have a ton of customers, and hurting me actually hurts them, so you really shouldn\u2019t mess with me.\u201d<\/p>\n
As much as I hate admitting it, the big lesson we should all learn from Tether<\/a> is exactly this. Tether has every problem in the book: opacity, regulatory risk, questionable reserves, and a management team that operates from jurisdictions specifically chosen to avoid oversight. And it doesn\u2019t really matter. Commercial inertia has made Tether nearly untouchable. Billions of dollars flow through it daily. Exchanges and traders depend on it so completely that disrupting Tether would cause more damage to the broader market than anything Tether itself has done, and everyone in regulation knows it.<\/p>\n
Then, there\u2019s something like Solana; everyone\u2019s favorite \u201cscalable\u201d blockchain\u2026 Solana<\/a> is a giant, centralized scam chain. Premined tokens, huge allocations to insiders, deep connections to FTX, and a foundation that unilaterally intervenes whenever the network chokes. If you wrote a checklist of everything a blockchain should NOT be, Solana would tick every box. And it doesn\u2019t really matter, because they marketed the living daylights out of their inferior but \u201cgood enough\u201d offerings, built commercial relationships, and created enough inertia that criticizing them feels academic.<\/p>\n
The response to every qualm, every governance dispute, every protocol argument, every X\/Twitter fight about who\u2019s doing it wrong, is actually business development and success. The qualms matter. But the system with the most customers can absorb the cost of its imperfections, while the system chasing perfection with twelve users cannot absorb anything at all, no matter how elegant the architecture looks on a whiteboard.<\/p>\n
![\"bitcoins](\"https:\/\/coingeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/commercial-inertia-shield.webp\")
<\/figure>\nThere\u2019s an old saying I come back to a lot: the best vengeance against my enemies is the laughter of my children. Stop worrying about what the other chains are doing wrong. Build something people use. Get customers. Create liquidity. Generate turnover. That\u2019s the armor. Everything else is commentary.<\/p>\n
Back to the top \u2191<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
BSV governance: better than you think<\/strong><\/p>\n
In BSV<\/a>, people love to complain that governance isn\u2019t perfect. \u201cBSV Association<\/a> has too much power\u2026\u201d \u201cThe NAR is too top-down\u2026\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s no democratic process\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Fair enough.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll listen to the criticism, and then I\u2019ll make the case that BSV has the best governance model of any blockchain in existence<\/a>, because the evidence supports it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a fundamental confusion that keeps surfacing in these debates, and Connor Murray<\/a> (Director of Stewardship at BSV Association) put his finger on it recently.<\/p>\n
\n \n\n
I want to acknowledge that from the outside looking in, this post might “make sense” because the Association can and should continue to be more open, transparent, and engaging with the BSV community. This is something that Asgeir and Siggi are fully committed to. As someone that\u2026 https:\/\/t.co\/jNTjkMOl41<\/a><\/p>\n
\u2014 Connor Murray (@Bitcoin_Beyond) March 29, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
People confuse decentralized governance with distributed systems. Bitcoin was never meant to be governed by a committee. It\u2019s a distributed network with defined rules, and the NAR codifies those rules so that everyone, including the governing body itself, plays by the same standard.<\/p>\n
The NAR wasn\u2019t thrown together by amateurs. It was modeled on the ISDA Master Agreement, the standard contract governing trillions of dollars in derivatives globally. The guy who wrote that agreement helped draft the NAR. This was deliberate: model the rules on frameworks that have actually been stress-tested in high-stakes commercial contexts where failure means real money lost, not forum arguments about decentralization philosophy.<\/p>\n
The NAR is a multilateral contract. It binds both BSV Association AND all nodes. BSV Association can\u2019t act outside the rules. Their powers are explicitly constrained to the original Bitcoin protocol as described in the white paper. \u201cSet in stone<\/a>\u201d is now a legal commitment, anchored to a fixed external standard, enforced through contract law. Any enforcement action requires BSV Association to act \u201creasonably and in good faith,\u201d with full due process through the enforcement rules (Part III) and dispute resolution rules (Part IV), which means the process has more procedural safeguards than most government regulatory actions.<\/p>\n
![\"bitcoins](\"https:\/\/coingeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/the-NAR-framework.webp\")
<\/figure>\nAnd the anchor doesn\u2019t move. The NAR is tethered to an external, unchangeable standard: the original Bitcoin protocol. You can\u2019t \u201cupdate\u201d a contract to contradict its own core premise. That\u2019s how contract law works, and the people who drafted this document understand contract law better than anyone complaining about it on social media.<\/p>\n
Compare that to BTC\u2019s \u201crough consensus,\u201d where rules change based on who shows up to a developer call. Compare it to Ethereum\u2019s governance, which literally reversed a blockchain to bail out a DAO hack.<\/p>\n
BSV published everything at nar.bsvblockchain.org<\/a>. Every rule, every enforcement mechanism, every dispute process, every constraint on BSV Association\u2019s own authority. Clear rules, published publicly, binding everyone equally, including the people who wrote them.<\/p>\n
The counterargument is always \u201cmake it a democracy.\u201d But turning BSV Association into an open charity with democratic governance would actually increase the attack surface. That would bring factions and voting blocs, and whoever organizes best wins. That\u2019s how protocols get captured. Rules-based systems resist capture because the rules apply regardless of who holds power, while political systems invite capture by design. I supported BSV precisely to prevent that, and I will keep supporting the model that makes political capture structurally impossible.<\/p>\n
Connor Murray, \u00c1sgeir \u00d3skarsson, and Siggi \u00d3skarsson, and the people whose names don\u2019t appear in public threads but whose work holds the system together, deserve real credit here, because they built a governance framework that functions under pressure without requiring anyone involved to be perfect.<\/p>\n
Back to the top \u2191<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
Anti-fragility through acceptance<\/strong><\/p>\n
Nassim Taleb gave us the vocabulary for this: systems that suppress volatility become fragile, and systems that absorb shocks get stronger. Anti-fragility is the capacity to benefit from disorder, from the unexpected, from the stresses that would break a rigid system.<\/p>\n
Bitcoin\u2019s \u201cmessy\u201d consensus was the anti-fragile design. Race conditions meant no single entity could control the outcome. Competitive mining meant the network\u2019s security scaled with commercial incentive. Lack of cryptographic finality meant the system required continuous economic participation from miners<\/a> who had real money on the line, not hobbyists running software in a closet.<\/p>\n
Every attempt to \u201cfix\u201d Bitcoin (BIPs, soft forks, UASF, SegWit, Lightning Network) has made BTC more fragile and more dependent on trusted intermediaries who introduced exactly the kind of counterparty risk that Bitcoin was designed to eliminate. Every \u201cimprovement\u201d added a new dependency. Every new layer added a new failure mode, a new set of developers to trust, a new attack surface to defend.<\/p>\n
![\"bitcoins](\"https:\/\/coingeek.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Talebs-spectrum-773x1024.webp\")
<\/figure>\nBSV took the opposite approach: Simplify, generalize, and lock the protocol, scale horizontally, build utility.<\/p>\n
BSV accepts the imperfections and builds despite them, because the alternative (reorganizing toward perfection) has classically been a massive cost to the BSV ecosystem too. Every governance debate, every internal fight about how things should be structured, every public thread framing the Association as the enemy at the exact moment the ecosystem is trying to establish credibility with regulators and legislators\u2026 all of that energy could have gone into building apps and acquiring customers, and the opportunity cost is real.<\/p>\n
The response to every qualm is business development and success.<\/p>\n
The response to governance complaints is more customers. The response to technical criticism is more utility. The response to market skepticism is more liquidity, more transactions, and more proof that the system works under load.<\/p>\n
Bitcoin was never meant to be perfect. It was meant to be good. Good enough to work, good enough to scale, good enough that the imperfections create competition rather than fragility, and good enough that accepting its flaws and building on them beats chasing perfection and catching nothing.<\/p>\n
BSV is good. Its governance and its protocol are good. None of it is perfect. And that, as I argued two years ago and will keep arguing until the industry figures it out, was always the point.<\/p>\n
The best vengeance against your enemies is the laughter of your children. So, have kids, and go build something people use. Be good to each other. And stay focused.<\/p>\n
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author\u2019s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.<\/em><\/p>\n
Back to the top \u2191<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n
Watch: History of Bitcoin with Kurt Wuckert Jr.<\/p>\n
\n \n - Harnessing commercial inertia<\/a><\/li>\n