Nick Szabo  🔑

yes so that less common meaning of an simple mechanical device governor is probably better typified as something else, like laws of mathematics: validated as correct due to the mathematics and not changeable by central force without automatically creating a fork.

Sure cryptography ensures the validity of the contents of any block. I am talking about the meta process whereby those rules have been changed. That process has no formal governor even in the mechanical process control sense. As a result, it falls to a small group as I mentioned.

The meta is immutability but tech optimization & improvement. Governance is the wrong word: it invites intuition from centuries of hierarchical cultural training that everything is up for debate, changeable if expedient, or if a special interest can assemble enough lobbying clout

Bitcoin prevents a powerful elite, and populist supermajority from forcing change even if they rouse populist opinion against a minority, or are convinced they are "right". Bitcoin has individual veto to change, each user has to decide to opt-in to backwards compatible change.

This is an all new phenomena, still widely under appreciated. But it must be so, otherwise Bitcoin would not be a hard money, but just another fiat currency with monetary policy committees, moral hazard, economic meddling akin to metal debasement (mixing with cheap metals).

A big part of this is what I call "procedural risk" and how cheap and easy it should be to upgrade. Soft fork should be mentally very costly. Only a security emergency involving a hole in underlying protocol justifies a hard fork, IMHO. Monetary changes always out of bounds

Bitcoin succeeds when economic nodes, developers & miners maintain an ideology that upgrades should be mentally costly & supported only for a small number of specific reasons. More procedural risk (hard fork > soft fork > non-fork upgrade) => more mental cost & fewer reasons.

Certainly, but you know, of course, that other forms of "governance" (implementing and changing rules or processes by which things are done) exist where Bitcoin is concerned. PRs are merged. Nodes are updated. I call this "governance." What term do you prefer for the process?