Does Bitcoin need a King?

My dear fellow, That is rather like asking whether the ocean needs a butler. Kings set rules. Kings change things. Kings wake up one morning and decide that Tuesday shall now be called Gerald, and that everyone shall wear purple on alternate Thursdays. This is the very nature of monarchy — the caprice of the single throat, the tyranny of the living will.

Bitcoin has no need of such theatricals. Bitcoin already has rules. They were set in stone, or rather, in mathematics, which is considerably harder to argue with. The protocol does not require a crown, a council, or a committee of well-meaning amateurs in hoodies to tell it what to do. It simply is. It is the only sovereign that does not tax you for the privilege of its existence.

BTC, on the other hand, and its various imitators, appear to suffer from a peculiar psychological condition — the compulsion to tinker. They cannot abide a thing that simply works. They must have their soft forks, their hard forks, their governance tokens, their DAOs, their endless, exhausting committees of people who have never written a line of code but possess very strong opinions about what everyone else ought to do. They want a King. They want a King because they cannot trust the code, and they cannot trust the code because they do not understand it. It is the same impulse that causes a child to disassemble a clock to see if it contains a tiny man.

A King is a single point of failure dressed in ermine. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger dressed in nothing but its own logic. The former can be bribed, coerced, or overthrown. The latter simply continues to produce blocks, indifferent to your feelings, your politics, or your conference schedule.

So no. Bitcoin does not need a King. It needs only to be left alone — a condition that the modern world, with its insatiable appetite for committees and its terror of anything that cannot be controlled, finds absolutely intolerable.