Michael Saylor: Bitcoin has won, but must prevent internal corruption

Michael Saylor stated on X that Bitcoin "has won," but the biggest challenge is not external enemies but internal governance risks. The most serious threat to Bitcoin is not "enemies outside the city gates" but internal factions creating justifications, modifying rules, and seizing economic benefits, ultimately turning freedom into permission and law into plunder. Saylor warned that Bitcoin's consensus rules are its "constitution," defining asset ownership, scarcity, settlement mechanisms, and power structures. Any modification of consensus rules to serve the interests of specific groups will harm the economic interests of current participants and future generations. Bitcoin may grow 100 times in the future and become global capital infrastructure, but a single wrong rule change today could cause future generations to lose markets that have not yet been established, technologies that have not yet emerged, and economic freedom that has not yet been realized. He criticized proposals attempting to alter Bitcoin's underlying rules, including BIP-110, which involves transaction censorship mechanisms, as well as directions like expanding block sizes and introducing more complex scripting mechanisms. Saylor believes that while these proposals differ in form, they are essentially about "a faction modifying Bitcoin's rules and transferring costs, risks, and impacts to all participants." Transaction censorship would limit users willing to pay fees to miners; expanding block sizes could weaken block space scarcity and increase network bandwidth and validation costs; complex covenant mechanisms could increase consensus complexity and introduce new attack surfaces. Saylor emphasized that miners invest capital to maintain Bitcoin's security, and the block reward halves every 210,000 blocks. Future network security will increasingly rely on the transaction fee market. Weakening the fee market would undermine defenses when Bitcoin needs security the most. The risk of rules being controlled by a minority faction not only affects miners but also exchanges, custodians, application developers, investors, and coin holders, making the interests of all participants subject to the influence of future rule-makers. Once a group can change consensus rules through political means, other groups will follow suit, leading to continuous protocol wars, capital flight, stagnant innovation, and declining security, preventing Bitcoin from reaching its potential. Saylor concluded 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, not by demands for profit. "Defending Bitcoin's constitution is defending the future."