What outsiders don&#x27;t seem to understand is the people shouting &quot;Bitcoin is or should be a democracy&quot; the loudest are the ones who stand to benefit the most from seizing power from the current core developers.<p>As if those people have any intention whatsoever to listen to the opinions of billions of poor people when making technical protocol decisions. They don&#x27;t want real democracy - they want <i>their</i> democracy where they&#x27;re in control. And for anyone wondering what that control looks like, here are some direct quotes from the &quot;democracy&quot; crew:<p>Gavin Andresen: &quot;there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa&#x2F;MasterCard&#x2F;etc networks&quot; [1]<p>Gavin Andresen: &quot;I think long-term the chain will not be secured purely by proof-of-work. I think when the Bitcoin network was tiny running solely on people&#x27;s home computers proof-of-work was the right way to secure the chain&quot; [2]<p>Gavin Andresen: &quot;bitcoin is already more decentralised than it needs to be&quot; [3]<p>Mike Hearn: &quot;probably 2 or 3 racks of machines&quot; [4]<p>Gavin Andresen: No, it&#x27;s completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don&#x27;t want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I&#x27;m confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that&#x27;s happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won&#x27;t be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won&#x27;t be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I&#x27;m confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcointalk.org&#x2F;?topic=3118.0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcointalk.org&#x2F;?topic=3118.0</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.linuxfoundation.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;bitcoin-dev&#x2F;2015-May&#x2F;008094.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.linuxfoundation.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;bitcoin-dev&#x2F;2015...</a><p>[3]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitcoin.kn&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;adam-back-gavin-andresen-block-size-increase&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitcoin.kn&#x2F;2015&#x2F;09&#x2F;adam-back-gavin-andresen-block...</a><p>[4]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.bitcoin.it&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Scalability&amp;oldid=3555" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.bitcoin.it&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Scalability&amp;oldid=35...</a><p>IOW, the goal of their democracy is to usurp control of full nodes from individual hands and make that into a Corporate-dominated service. It would basically turn Bitcoin into an enterprise database that most people are stuck accessing as a proprietary SaaS.