Michael Saylor: Bitcoin has already won, but it must be prevented from internal corruption.

PANews July 29, Michael Saylor said in a long post on the X platform that Bitcoin has “already won,” but the biggest challenge today is not coming from external enemies—it comes from internal governance risk. Bitcoin’s most serious threat is not “enemies outside the city gate,” but internal factions that ultimately turn freedom into permission and law into plunder by manufacturing reasons, changing rules, and seizing economic interests.

Saylor warns that Bitcoin’s consensus rules are its “constitution,” defining asset ownership, scarcity, settlement mechanisms, and power structures. Any act of changing consensus rules to serve the interests of a particular group will harm the economic interests of current participants as well as future generations. Bitcoin may grow 100x and become the global capital infrastructure, but a single incorrect rule change today could cause future generations to lose markets that have not yet been established, technologies that have not yet appeared, and economic freedom that has not yet been achieved.

He criticizes proposals that try to change Bitcoin’s underlying rules, including schemes involving transaction review mechanisms such as BIP-110, as well as directions like expanding block size and introducing more complex script mechanisms. Saylor believes that although these proposals look different in form, their essence is the same: “some faction changing Bitcoin’s rules and shifting the costs, risks, and impact onto all participants.” Transaction review would limit users who miners’ services are willing to charge fees to; expanding block size could weaken the scarcity of block space and increase network bandwidth and verification costs; complex covenant mechanisms could increase consensus complexity and create new attack surfaces.

Saylor emphasizes that miners invest capital to maintain Bitcoin’s security, while the block reward halves once every 210k blocks; in the future, network security will rely more and more on the transaction fee market. If the fee market is weakened, defensive capability will be weakened when Bitcoin needs security protections the most. The risk that rules are controlled by a small number of factions affects not only miners, but also exchanges, custodians, application developers, investors, and coin holders—so that the interests of all participants are influenced by whoever sets future rules.

Once a group is able to change consensus rules through political means, other groups will follow suit, ultimately leading to a sustained protocol war, capital flight, stalled innovation, and declining security. Bitcoin will be unable to realize its potential.

In the end, Saylor calls on Bitcoin to keep the base layer simple, neutral, scarce, and secure, place innovation in the surrounding ecosystem, and drive development through voluntary adoption and localized trial and error. Protocol upgrades must remain rare and conservative, driven by necessity rather than by interest demands. “Defending Bitcoin’s constitution is defending the future.”