Michael Saylor: Bitcoin Has Won, But Must Be Protected from Internal Corruption

On July 29, Michael Saylor published a lengthy post on the X platform stating that Bitcoin has "already won," but the biggest challenge it faces is not from external enemies, but from internal governance risks. The most serious threat to Bitcoin is not the "enemies outside the city walls," but internal factions that create justifications, modify rules, and seize economic rights, ultimately turning freedom into permission and law into plunder.

Saylor warns that the consensus rules of Bitcoin are its "constitution," defining asset ownership, scarcity, settlement mechanisms, and power structures. Any modification of the consensus rules to satisfy the interests of specific groups will harm the economic rights of current participants and future generations. Bitcoin could potentially grow 100 times, becoming a global capital infrastructure, but a single erroneous rule change today could deprive future generations of unestablished markets, yet-to-emerge technologies, and unrealized economic freedoms.

He criticizes certain proposals that attempt to change Bitcoin's underlying rules, including BIP-110, which involves transaction review mechanisms, as well as proposals to increase block size and introduce more complex scripting mechanisms. Saylor believes that although these proposals take different forms, they essentially represent "a faction modifying Bitcoin's rules and shifting costs, risks, and impacts onto all participants." Transaction reviews would limit the users willing to pay fees for miner services; increasing block size could undermine the scarcity of block space and raise network bandwidth and validation costs; complex covenant mechanisms could increase consensus complexity and introduce new attack vectors.

Saylor emphasizes that miners invest capital to maintain Bitcoin's security, and block rewards are halved every 210,000 blocks. In the future, network security will increasingly rely on the transaction fee market. Weakening the fee market will undermine defensive capabilities at the very time Bitcoin needs security the most. The risk of rules being controlled by a minority faction not only affects miners but also impacts exchanges, custodians, application developers, investors, and holders, making all participants' interests subject to the influence of future rule-makers.

Once a group can change consensus rules through political means, other groups will follow suit, ultimately leading to a continuous protocol war, capital flight, stagnation of innovation, and decreased security, preventing Bitcoin from realizing its potential.

Saylor concludes by calling for Bitcoin to maintain a simple, neutral, scarce, and secure base layer, with innovation occurring in the peripheral ecosystem, driven by voluntary adoption and localized trial and error. Protocol upgrades must remain rare, conservative, and driven by necessity rather than self-interest. "Defending Bitcoin's constitution is defending the future."