> ... There exists, therefore, an obvious discrepancy between the libertarian vision of Bitcoin as a decentralised infrastructure that cannot be regulated by any third party institution, and the actual governance structure that dictates the technological development of Bitcoin — which, in spite of its open-source nature, is highly centralised and undemocratic. ...

I'm a little surprised about the lack of discussion around code forks and hard forks.

Thousands upon thousands of networks based on either the actual Satoshi code or the ideas it embodies have been launched over the last ten years. Bitcoin itself sustained one major hard fork that persists to this day (Bitcoin Cash).

Each one of those projects represents someone making a choice that the status quo wasn't good enough. Most will die sooner than Bitcoin, but some won't.

The result is a kind of decentralization that's very hard to control: hundreds of competing projects, each one trying to be the next X.