The tower of Babel was an affront to God, and Bitcoin was an affront to government. So each was smashed by the power it challenged.

There are hints in Roger Ver’s provocative book, Hijacking Bitcoin: The Hidden History of BTC, that Bitcoin’s hamstrung technical configuration is a product of government subversion. Happily, those insinuations are few and far between, because Ver’s stronger case is that Bitcoin’s original technical plan was changed by a coterie of developers who parted ways with Satoshi Nakamoto’s design on their own.

There are so many cryptocurrencies—a post-Babel crypto world exists—because of one technical decision that fettered the original crypto, Ver says, driving innovators out. As evidence he quotes Vitalik Buterin, inventor of number two cryptocurrency, Ethereum, who wrote in 2017, “I consider Bitcoin’s *failure* to raise block sizes to keep fees reasonable to be a large (non-consensual) change to the ‘original plan.’” Buterin and now many coders and coding groups have created a variety of coins and tokens that serve many purposes—analogizing to the polyglot world that followed Babel.

Ver disagreed and still strongly disagrees with the decision to keep Bitcoin blocks small, limiting the throughput of the original and still largest (dollar-value) cryptocurrency. This book tells his side.

Score-settling can be found, and his opponents understandably feel hard done by, but Ver and co-author Steve Patterson seem to have done their best to minimize vitriol. That is relative to the passion that made Ver “Bitcoin Jesus”—religious metaphor number two. They are wisely speaking to the more important audience: crypto adopters to come.

Among many lessons to draw from the book is that cryptocurrency governance is—to understate things—a pending issue. At a recent AEI event on cryptocurrency and in his book Read Write Own, Chris Dixon of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz recounted some of the governance options available in crypto networks, granting that the challenge of governance has not been solved.

I described my intuition that Bitcoin would ideally have a power triumvirate of coders, miners, and users. If each had sufficient, deep knowledge of their interests in relation to cryptocurrency design, their choices to adopt or refuse different software versions would guide a cryptocurrency forward in the least centralized way. But as yet nobody knows how to run a cryptocurrency consistent with the decentralized creed at the center of the technology.

The “winners” of the block size debate, also ably covered in Jonathan Bier’s The Blocksize War, probably perceive the process as sufficiently decentralized. They almost certainly would not if Ver’s “side” had won. And that, in a nutshell, is the illustration that the governance nut has not been cracked.

Ver’s response to the failing of Bitcoin (BTC) to grow in throughput has been to back Bitcoin Cash (BCH). He recounts, though, how that cryptocurrency has suffered its own leadership crisis due to the centripetal effect of, well—apparently—having coders.

BCH has fallen steadily in dollar value since it split from BTC in August 2017 (at block 478558, if you want to impress your friends with crypto trivia). This is plain evidence of the collective judgment that Bitcoin Core—Ver’s opposites—were right. The market has spoken.

But Ver’s plausible belief is that the masses have yet to recognize the superiority of bigger blocks. One simple network could handle all the world’s transactions. We don’t need the “layer 2” systems whose success at making Bitcoin scalable have been just over the horizon for a very long time now.

Earlier in his career, Ver headed up a company that designed and sold computer memory products, and Hijacking Bitcoin attacks the argument that storage and bandwidth costs require a limited block size. Presently it would cost about $100 per month to store 100 billion additional transactions. Satoshi Nakamoto predicted bandwidth costs of $18 per day, or $6,500 per year, and those costs have dramatically fallen since then.

Such outlays mean that not every individual would run a full Bitcoin node. But 100 billion transactions paying fees of just $0.01 each would make $1 million per day available to miners. They and every exchange and financial services provider would run full nodes, as would non-profit organizations, government entities, and the many Lamborghini drivers interested in protecting the network. That, believes Ver, is decentralized enough.

Hijacking Bitcoin should not be the last word. It would be great if a backer of Bitcoin Core articulated in as accessible a way how the present technical configuration of Bitcoin is superior. I am eager to see the argument in long-form print, a special kind of commitment to structured thought. Without that, the debate will remain largely, and unfortunately, religious.

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