A small group of Bitcoin users is convinced that “Blockstreamcore” is the biggest threat to the future of Bitcoin. I’m not talking about trolls, but people with this legitimate concern.

I disagree that developer “centralisation” is the biggest threat to bitcoin, because in my eyes, developers actually have the least power in Bitcoin of all the stakeholders.

Developers:

Core developers work with an admirable level of transparency. Everything they do gets thoroughly discussed, publicly published and peer-reviewed to the moon.

Even if a developer proposes an idea that is harmful to bitcoin, the network remains largely unaffected because it takes weeks, months or years until the development is complete and the eventual live implementation of the code.

This gives all stakeholders plenty of time to question decisions and motives on this fully transparent process.

Developers can try to convince other stakeholders that their approach is best, like literally going to visit them around the world, but if their code doesn’t reflect that, it won’t fly, because the vast majority of nodes still need to accept changes.

This means that all that developers can do is:

Writing the best possible code. Proposing it to the community. Explaining it as clearly as possible. Hoping it will get adopted or improved upon.

Users:

If users disagree with anything developers, miners or businesses say or do, they can vote with their wallets by leaving a service or selling their bitcoin.

Voting-by-wallet has an instant impact on the other stakeholders, which need to adapt to this behaviour.

Miners:

If even a single mining pool operator sends out a tweet that threatens Bitcoin in some way, it can instantly crash the price and have many people concerned about the near future of the network.

Of course miners have a reputation to consider (as do all stakeholders), but as we’ve seen, miners can get away with a lot more than other stakeholders, like mining empty blocks and not adopting improvements without transparently communicating why.

As guardians of the network, their voice carries a lot of weight with the community.

Businesses:

If a bitcoin business, especially an exchange, is in trouble (such as an outage or hack), it can instantly impact the price and network.

The public perception of Bitcoin tends to suffer because of this too, as bad news rapidly gets spread by mainstream media.

Businesses are often the face of Bitcoin and play a large role in how it is perceived by the rest of the world, which traditionally gravitates towards economic voices.