05-20-2025 
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In the early days of Bitcoin, the narrative was romantic, revolutionary, and even utopian. A monetary system free from the grip of central banks, a decentralized economy governed by math, game theory and protocol-enforced incentives: a network powered by pure opportunity among all people. For many, it was a digital revolution against the creeping tyranny of financial elites. But as we’ve crossed into 2025, the facade is in full rot, revealing a governance structure eerily reminiscent of the one it claimed to oppose, mixed with some of the worst elements of social culture of the last century.
For nearly a decade, I’ve warned that BTC’s governance model was little more than a digital Soviet Union. Built on soft rules, unwritten norms, and social coercion, it has long mirrored the contradictions of communist revolutions: a populist movement hijacked by its own central committee with all sides pointing at each other as class traitors in a permanent state of internal revolution.
Let’s trace the lineage.
The seeds of this ideological inversion were planted during the 2015-2017 Bitcoin block size wars. Ostensibly, this was a technical debate. In reality, it was a cultural revolution. Under the banner of decentralization, the small blockers rejected any change requiring more bandwidth or computing power to run a full node. Their reasoning? If running a node became expensive, the working class, or the “plebs,” as they came to be known, would be excluded from power— because God forbid someone have to invest monetarily in the weight of their influence!
In theory, this sounds noble. In practice, it was socialist central planning by another name.
Instead of allowing a free market to determine the cost of participation in the network, they enforced rate limits, artificially constraining block sizes, and stifling transaction throughput. The result? Scarcity. Not the organic scarcity of supply and demand, but the engineered scarcity of planned economies. And as with all planned economies, this false scarcity led to specific benefits for part of the economy at the cost of inefficiencies, perverse incentives, and eventually, unrest in other parts of the economy.
The UASF (User Activated Soft Fork) was the Bolshevik moment.
In 2017, mostly anonymous node runners coordinated to push through SegWit, framing industrial miners as the bourgeoisie, the capitalists threatening their egalitarian utopia. This was digital class warfare. The plebs, emboldened by ideological fervor, violent imagery and memes, triumphed. However, what they inherited was not a free system. It was a politburo of GitHub maintainers, Reddit moderators, and Twitter influencers, all signalling with anything but hash power—the Bitcoin equivalent of the Soviet central committee.
They had defeated the greedy, corporate miners and seized the means of propagation!
Fast forward to 2025. A recent proposal to change OP_RETURN policy in Bitcoin Core has sparked outrage. Why? Because it threatens the perceived control of the node-running class. In stark contrast to having the power to stop productive use of the blockchain for profit-seeking on chain, they were sternly told what the next edict from Bitcoin Core would be.
Suddenly, the plebs cry foul, realizing they were never in charge. Their so-called power was performative, tolerated so long as it served the interests of the real elite: the intelligentsia of the protocol—conveniently backed by old-world money, by the way.
This is the Soviet pattern all over again. The kulaks of early BTC—miners and entrepreneurs—were demonized and purged from the party in the name of the revolution. The Mensheviks—moderate developers and investors—were sidelined or silenced. Now, even the original Bolsheviks, the plebs who fought for small blocks, are being purged by a new class of apparatchiks who serve corporate masters behind closed doors.
The revolution, as always, devours its own.
And what of the heroes? Jack Mallers, portrayed as a plucky everyman, is a third-generation heir to a Chicago TradFi dynasty. Max Keiser, a self-styled revolutionary, cavorts with state media in Russia and cozies up to Central American dictators. Adam Back and Gregory Maxwell, once icons of the cypherpunk movement, raised funds from MasterCard (NASDAQ: MA), AXA (NASDAQ: AXAHF), and New York Life. The disconnect is staggering. Jack Dorsey? Bearded Buddhist Bitcoiner? Nah. Brutal enforcer of the Biden Censorship board and selling your data to the highest bidder. Don’t like what the Core devs are doing? You’re misled…
The plebs were sold a story about smashing the elite, only to be ushered into the slaughter on the altar of the new elite’s digital fiefdom.
This was never about decentralization. It was always about becoming the new aristocracy, and the plebs just realized that it might not be them! HODL, they said, and you’ll be rich. “Do nothing, and you will inherit the Earth.” Opposition to capitalists, builders, and industrialists became dogma. Mining, scaling, and building real businesses? All treated as threats to the order. A closed-loop economy emerged where the most virtuous action was inaction, and where value comes not from utility but from ruthlessly maintaining the scarcity illusion.
Compare this to Rockefeller’s support for the USSR. He was staunchly opposed to Marxism, but because Soviet oil fields were lucrative, he turned them into business partners. Likewise, MasterCard and BlackRock don’t support BTC because they believe in freedom. They support it because they neutered its disruptive potential and turned it into a sandbox for financial derivatives. BTC became the perfect asset: volatile enough to trade, docile enough to never threaten their real business.
And now, the plebs are waking up. Some are defecting to Bitcoin Knots.
There are whispers of betrayal. The forums smell of mutiny. But the truth is brutal: there is no revolution left to win. The mechanism for protocol change is closed. The narrative is set. The reins are held by those who understand power, not decentralization.
What happens next? Perhaps a violent schism. When ideologies collapse, people often resort to desperate measures. The plebs, convinced of their power, may lash out at the Core devs. Or the Core devs, anticipating a coup, may preemptively “cancel” a prominent pleb or two to maintain control. The digital show trials are already underway.
Bitcoin was meant to be a technological capitalist tool for breaking the hegemony of legacy payments and finance. Instead, it became the BTC commune where nothing is built, value is abstract, and power is opaque, and those of us who cared about Bitcoin’s original vision have already been exiled…
I have long predicted this. The fallout of UASF was never the end. It was merely Act I.
And I warn again: if your revolution is built on myth and memes, if your governance is centralized in the shadows, if your roadmap is dictated by ideology rather than economic incentives or sound engineering, then what you have is not Bitcoin. What you have is a closed-loop digital Soviet Union, and those always collapse.
The BTC revolution is already over. The question now is, who will survive it long enough to do something valuable?
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