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

This "Monetary changes always out of bounds" is why I think governance is the wrong word. When people who don't know FOSS, IETF consensus and fork game-theory, which is all novel and counter-intuitive, hear governance they think there is a committee and cast around looking for it