Nick Szabo  🔑

thing is, governance implies there is a governor "an official with the power" which absolutely must be absent and we need to ruthlessly educate newcomers why Bitcoin can not work that way. more like improved metallurgy process, which are fine if people opt to accept the gold bars

There doesnt need to be a single person or entity that needs to be a "governor". A group of people would qualify too. Economic majority, or miners etc.

but such things abound in the world. whether it's a governance board, monetary policy committee staffed by politicians, monetary economists, or representatives of companies, or public interest non-for profits. formal organizations are extremely vulnerable to political capture and

the same applies in spades to "crypto currencies" which have such boards, as they have the additional problem of not having experience, failing to conflict of interests. there is some irony in that the genesis block quote used by satoshi of the chancellor of the exchequer quoted

as "being on the brink of 2nd bailout for banks" which for context came after protracted political debate in the public sphere with the governor of the bank of england warning about moral hazard, ie politics overriding prudent financial action to not reallocate risk to the public

so i think mislabelling tech improvements "governance" sets a very wrong expectation, of groups of humans in positions of authority deciding. there is no deciding there is just opt-in, backwards-compatible bitcoinium metallurgy improvements, which people adopt by consensus.

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.