The word decentralization is one of the most misunderstood concepts in digital assets. Too often, it is reduced to a numbers game: how many miners, how many stakers, how many wallets, how many nodes. But real decentralization is not about headcount. It is about power. Specifically, it is about ensuring that no single actor — or small coalition — can unilaterally change rules or outcomes. By that measure, Bitcoin SV (BSV) and Bitcoin Core (BTC) reveal two very different approaches.
BTC: Oligarchy Through Fee Control
A recent case illustrates the point. On the BTC chain, one miner managed to mine eight consecutive blocks. This was not impossible mathematically, but it demonstrated how concentrated hashrate can give one party effective control — at least for a time — over transaction inclusion.
BTC’s Replace-By-Fee (RBF) policy compounds the issue. With RBF, miners are free to reorder or drop pending transactions whenever a higher-fee replacement arrives. The effect is an auction market where miners, acting as gatekeepers, extract maximum fees from users in real time. This means:
- Transaction order is not neutral, but subject to miner discretion.
- Users have no contractual recourse; they must outbid one another.
- Miners can exercise price-setting power without accountability.
Decentralization in BTC therefore looks more like a rotating oligarchy: a handful of large miners, each with temporary unilateral control, operating within a system whose rules are still subject to change by a small group of developers.
BSV: Immutable Protocol, Predictable Service
BSV takes a very different path. Its protocol has been “set in stone,” meaning rule changes are not dictated by a developer committee. Unlike BTC, BSV does not allow RBF; transactions are processed on a first-seen basis, ensuring ordering is neutral and predictable. It maintains Satoshi’s original design.
In addition, BSV supports a business-oriented model where enterprises can contract directly with miners for transaction services. This turns fee-setting into a matter of transparent service-level agreements (SLAs) rather than opaque bidding wars.
Key features of this model include:
- Immutability of protocol rules: no unilateral changes by developers.
- Neutral ordering: miners cannot arbitrarily reshuffle transactions.
- Predictable pricing: fees can be set by contract, not auction.
The result is a system where miners compete on performance and reliability, not on exploiting congestion through discretionary pricing.
Redefining Decentralization
If decentralization is about eliminating unilateral control, then BTC falls short. Developers can change the protocol; miners can control fees and order of transactions; users remain subject to forces beyond their influence.
By contrast, BSV’s design ensures that rules cannot be altered at will, and that market pricing emerges through explicit contracts, not arbitrary miner decisions. In this sense, BSV more closely aligns with the true spirit of decentralization: a system where no single entity — or small coalition — can dictate outcomes for everyone else.
Conclusion
Decentralization is not about how many people plug in machines. It is about whether power is constrained by unchangeable rules. BTC decentralization has devolved into a competitive oligarchy, where miners exercise fee discretion and developers retain protocol authority. BSV decentralization rests on a more fundamental principle: immutability of rules and neutrality of transaction processing. That makes BSV not only more scalable, but also more faithful to Bitcoin’s original promise of a system that no one can change unilaterally.