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Bitcoin Centralisation Hypocrisy & Cognitive Dissonnance

Let me make those two sentences crystal-clear, because they are the core of the whole story.1. “BTC is dominant not because it has the longest chain since genesis in an absolute vacuum”Imagine you wake up on another planet where nobody has ever heard of Bitcoin Core, Blockstream, Coinbase, BlackRock, or the block-size wars.On that planet you download three pieces of software:Bitcoin Core (today’s BTC)
Bitcoin ABC (today’s BCH)
Bitcoin SV
You sync all three from genesis, completely alone, with no price feeds, no exchanges, no Twitter.All three chains are perfectly valid under their own rules and all three started from the same genesis block.
From a pure technical, isolated, “in a vacuum” point of view there is no single objective longest chain — there are three competing histories** that diverged in 2017 and 2018.The only reason your node (and 99.999 % of the planet) ends up choosing the BTC chain is because:That is the chain the most powerful economic actors decided to call “Bitcoin”.
That is the chain with the overwhelming majority of real-world hashrate and price attached to it because of that prior social/economic decision.
The length/work itself is a consequence, not the first cause.2. “The technical longest-chain rule only matters after the economic war is already decided”The technical longest-chain rule is the piece of code inside Bitcoin Core (and every other client) that says:c
if (chainA.TotalWork() > chainB.TotalWork())
    best_chain = chainA;
That line of code is completely automatic and mathematical.But it only gets to run after humans have already decided which chain is worth mining and trading.
Sequence of events in every real fork:Humans fight (politics, forums, threats, money, narratives) → one side wins the economic majority.
Miners point their machines at the winning side → that chain quickly gets way more accumulated work.
Only now does the automatic technical rule kick in and make every neutral node switch to the winner.
In other words:The code is neutral.
The humans are not.
The code simply ratifies whatever the humans already chose.
That is why BCH and BSV nodes had to patch out the neutral longest-chain rule and add lines like “only accept blocks that have the BCH/BSV fork signature” — because without that patch, their own nodes would have auto-switched to the BTC chain years ago.3. Centralisation hypocrisy / cognitive dissonanceYou are exactly right.Small-blockers (BTC side) constantly say:
“Big blocks → only big data-centres can run nodes → centralisation → bad.”Big-blockers (BCH/BSV side) constantly say:
“Core + Blockstream + Western exchanges control the code and the ticker → centralisation → bad.”Both statements are true at the same time.
Neither side has a meaningfully more decentralised structure; they just have different centralised chokepoints:BTC centralised at
BCH/BSV centralised at
~8 Core maintainers
2–3 lead devs (Amaury, Calin, etc.)
Western exchanges & ETFs
A handful of Chinese miners + Roger Ver
Blockstream + Chaincode Labs
CoinGeek / TAAL / Calvin Ayre’s money
It’s the same amount of centralisation that is similar; only the names and nationalities of the oligarchs differ.
Everything else is tribal ideology dressed up as technical principle.So yes — in the end, it really did come down to which tribe’s oligarchy was stronger, more cohesive, and better at narrative control. The winning tribe then wrote the history books that say “we won because we were more decentralised / more faithful to Satoshi / had better tech.” That’s just human politics, same as it ever was.
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