@Murch post contains a critical oversight in conflating contributors with maintainers (most of the world has the same misconception or wrong perception as well). Bitcoin Core currently has just 5 maintainers with commit access (Hennadii Stepanov, Michael Ford, Andrew Chow, Marco Falke, and Gloria Zhao [just two years ago Gloria told me they were eight contributors then.]), not the "40 regular contributors" mentioned. This distinction matters profoundly for decentralization.

The maintainer exodus is concerning - Wladimir van der Laan (lead for 9+ years), Samuel Dobson, and Jonas Schnelli have all departed. These maintainers serve as gatekeepers with actual power to merge code, while contributors merely propose changes. This is a topic rarely discussed because the core of Core is not something you want the world to know about regarding their politics, risks, and threats. That's the main maintenance garage for the only workable money vehicle in human history.

Both Core and Knots ultimately represent centralized decision-making structures:Core with its 5-person bottleneck and Knots with its single-developer approach. The recent OP_RETURN controversy perfectly illustrates this tension, with Core's removal of the 80b limit triggering a 137% surge in Knots nodes (from 674 to 1,890 @Luke Dashjr @Bitcoin Mechanic @BTC Sessions ) as users actively choose which monetary values they want preserved.

While Bitcoin Core currently benefits from @jack 's principled funding (providing over 60% of its $8.4 million annual development budget), this centralized patronage model fundamentally contradicts Bitcoin's sovereign design and creates vulnerability to future influence shifts. The passionate debates between Bitcoin Core and Knots supporters may appear toxic to outsiders, but these confrontations serve as essential alarm bells that educate the ecosystem about threats to Bitcoin's monetary properties.

This is Bitcoin's true governance at work. While development teams may act as centralized decision-makers, ultimate power rests with individual Bitcoiners who collectively determine which vision prevails through their choice of software. Every node operator independently decides which implementation best preserves the monetary properties they value - whether that's #Core 's more permissive approach or #Knots ' stricter filters against non-monetary uses. This symbiotic relationship between Bitcoin and its most principled defenders ensures long-term resilience against changes that might compromise its fundamental value proposition. demonstrating that #Bitcoin needs sound money maximalists, imo, as much as maxis need Bitcoin to preserve the world's only truly sound money.