Ambitious developers are biggest risk to Bitcoin, says Michael Saylor

The biggest risk to Bitcoin, according to Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) founder Michael Saylor, is ambitious developers. Although he’s casually said as much in long-form interviews before, he put any doubt about his belief to rest by publishing it directly on his social media yesterday.

In Saylor’s view, developers have the power to introduce unknown risks by skipping the tedious work of cybersecurity while focusing on new features.

“Defend the network, don’t F with the network,” Saylor said in September. “There are lots of protocol changes that actually destabilize the network.”

On September 16, Saylor reiterated this belief. “The biggest danger is a very talented, well-funded, well-intentioned developer trying to do something good,” he said. “That’s the danger. That is fundamentally the issue. A very competent, well-funded, well-intentioned developer that wants to upgrade the protocol. That is the risk.”

Bitcoin is the result of ambition

Of course, Bitcoin is many things — a distributed database, payment rail, open source software, communication network, timestamp server, cryptographic protocol, digital commodity, marketplace for electricity and computation, and many other things — built on the work of decades of ambitious developers as far back as the 1950s.

Satoshi Nakamoto, in an obvious sign of ambition, published the motivation for Bitcoin itself as a response to government bank bailouts.

The project’s whitepaper repeatedly laments “that the fate of the entire money system depends on the company running the mint,” and even inscribed a bank bailout as motivation for Bitcoin’s genesis.

In addition to decades of contributions from ambitious cryptographers, since Bitcoin launched on mainnet in 2009, thousands of ambitious developers have specifically modified Bitcoin itself. 

For example, users can now secure their private keys using simple dictionary words, rather than a 64-character HEX number. They can also create multiple keypairs from a single seed phrase, as well as spend from multi-signature wallets with as much privacy as a single-signature wallet.

All of these formerly ambitious developments are uncontested as obvious improvements to Bitcoin. They went live years before Saylor began purchasing bitcoin (BTC) for Strategy in August 2020.

Now that Saylor is paying attention to Bitcoin developers, however, he’s displeased.

Read more: Michael Saylor is running out of ways to boost Strategy’s BTC per share

The ‘greatest’ risk to Bitcoin

If Saylor had his wish, developers would defend, not upgrade, the network. 

Reactions to Saylor are mixed, ranging widely from staunch support to clear criticism. Samson Mow, Jesse Myers, Cøbra, Alex Bergeron, and over 1,000 others retweeted Saylor’s claim.

The key word in Saylor’s claim is greatest. Everyone agrees that there’s a risk of unintended bugs or knock-on effects during a protocol upgrade. Whether this risk is the “greatest” risk to Bitcoin is a matter of disagreement.

Jameson Lopp, for example, disagrees with Saylor. “The greatest risk to Bitcoin is that ownership of keys is centralizing into fewer hands,” said Lopp, critiquing Saylor’s trust in custodians like Coinbase. 

“You advocated freezing lost coins,” Pledditor reminded Saylor, after Saylor recommended an ambitious upgrade to Bitcoin that would freeze Satoshi’s BTC as a defense against quantum computing.

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