Evan Shapiro: Bitcoin's Stolen Revolution

Evan Shapiro is CEO and co-founder of O(1) Labs, the team behind Coda Protocol, a lightweight chain that affords all participants fully P2P, permissionless access from any device.

Systems of power are rapidly asserting control over Bitcoin.

We either demand that the properties of user ownership and censorship resistance pioneered by Bitcoin persist.

First, let's take a look at who controls the Bitcoin blockchain.

If I described to you a council of 10 companies dictating the future of a product, and more than half are in China and beholden to a centralized government, would you call that decentralized? No, but that's the state of Bitcoin today.

Maybe you say, "Even a 51% attack would be fine by me, because they are still economically aligned in the best interest of the protocol." You'd be very wrong, but you wouldn't be the first person to assume that a centralized power could represent your interests well.

There are countless examples in history of misplaced trust in a centralized authority.

Without checks against centralized power, what remains is to trust it will all be ok.

Why would this time be any different? Because Bitcoin is somehow inherently different? Because the person, or people, who created it had revolutionary ideas? Come on.

When you make a bitcoin transaction on Coinbase or Binance, you don't make the actual transaction.