To the best of this author's knowledge, there have been no significant coordinated attempts to alter the monetary policy of Bitcoin,3 but even far simpler attempts at altering some of the technical specifications of the code have so far failed. The reason that even seemingly innocuous changes to the protocol are extremely hard to carry out is the distributed nature of the network, and the need for many disparate and adversarial parties to agree to changes whose impact they cannot fully understand, while the safety and tried‐and‐tested familiarity of the status quo remains fully familiar and
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