{"id":264606,"date":"2024-11-15T16:38:44","date_gmt":"2024-11-15T16:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/15\/no-blackrock-wont-ossify-bitcoin\/"},"modified":"2025-06-25T17:10:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-25T17:10:29","slug":"no-blackrock-wont-ossify-bitcoin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/15\/no-blackrock-wont-ossify-bitcoin\/","title":{"rendered":"No, BlackRock Won\u2019t Ossify Bitcoin"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Follow Aaron on <\/em>Nostr<\/a> or <\/em>X<\/a>.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his\u00a0Take<\/a> from Wednesday, Shinobi argued that the surge of institutional bitcoin adoption will lead to premature ossification of the Bitcoin protocol. While I share this concern to an extent, I am less convinced this is necessarily true.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin is inherently a permissionsless system. For protocol changes specifically, it \u201cjust\u201d requires users to upgrade their software. And when it comes to deploying soft forks, it really only needs a majority of miners to upgrade. (This is admittedly a simplification for the sake of brevity, but I\u2019d say it\u2019s still \u201ctrue enough\u201d to state it this way.)<\/p>\n

Miners will for the most part follow economic incentives. If a protocol upgrade makes Bitcoin (say) more scalable or more private, there is actually good reason to think this would make Bitcoin more valuable, which in turn means there is good reason to think miners will activate the upgrade.<\/p>\n

Even in an extreme scenario where a soft fork occurs through a user activated soft fork (UASF) that splits the blockchain, and even if in this scenario the institutions prefer the legacy version of the chain (this is the scenario Shinobi is ultimately envisioning), it\u2019s not obvious to me that the non-upgraded chain would \u201cwin\u201d.<\/p>\n

Just owning lots of bitcoin does not give you a \u201csay\u201d on which side of a chain split is more valuable. Initially, everyone receives coins on both sides. Only <\/em>if you\u2019re willing to buy or sell these coins (eg.: \u201cdump\u201d coins on one side of the split to get more coins on the other side) does your economic weight matter. But this means you have to take a risk: skin in the game.<\/p>\n

Would big institutions really be willing to bet everything they own on the version of the protocol without the upgrade? That\u2019s a big assumption to make.<\/p>\n

This article is a <\/em>Take<\/a><\/em>. Opinions expressed are entirely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

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[ad_1] Follow Aaron on Nostr or X. In his\u00a0Take from Wednesday, Shinobi argued that the surge of institutional bitcoin adoption will lead to premature ossification<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":264607,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michigandigitalnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}