Daily Crypto Deep Dive: Who Really Controls Bitcoin? Miners, Developers, Whales and the Fight for BTC

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Welcome back to the Daily Crypto Deep Dive. Bitcoin has no CEO, it has no headquarters, no board of directors, no government controls it. Michael Saylor cannot change its rules. BlackRock cannot change its rules. The United States government cannot simply order Bitcoin to create another 10 million coins. And yet somehow Bitcoin does change. New software is released, new features are introduced, rules can be tightened, miners signal support for upgrades, developers write code, exchanges decide which assets get called BTC.
Whales control billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. And thousands of node operators around the world decide which blocks they will accept and which they will reject. So who actually controls Bitcoin? Because saying nobody controls it sounds good, but it is not quite the full answer.
The truth is far more interesting.
Before we get into it, a quick word on Kraken. If you are looking for a crypto exchange, you can sign up to Kraken using our link in the episode description. Kraken is one of the longest established names in crypto, and by using our link, you are also directly supporting the show at no extra cost to yourself. And we are still giving away 20 XRP to listeners who sign up to Kraken through our link, so make sure you use the link in the description and then let us know once you have signed up. Now back to the question at the heart of today's deep dive. Bitcoin is controlled by a permanent power struggle between developers, miners, node operators, exchanges, businesses, investors and the wider market. None of them has absolute power. Every one of them has some influence. And when they disagree badly enough, Bitcoin can literally split into two different networks.
Today, we are going to work through exactly who has what power, who can stop a change, who can force a change, whether owning hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin gives you any control over the protocol, and what actually happens when the biggest players in Bitcoin refuse to agree. And by the end, we are going to answer one deceptively difficult question.
If Bitcoin has no ruler, who decides what Bitcoin actually is?
Let's start with perhaps the most obvious candidate. The people who write the code. Bitcoin Core is the dominant software implementation used across the Bitcoin network. Developers propose changes to that software, review code, find bugs, and create new releases. That sounds like enormous power, and it is. But a Bitcoin developer cannot simply wake up tomorrow, change the maximum supply from 21 million to 42 million, press a button, and impose that change on everyone. They can write the code. They can publish the code. Maintainers can even merge code into a software repository. But nobody is forced to download it. That distinction is absolutely fundamental to understanding Bitcoin. A developer can propose a new version of the rules, but Bitcoin users ultimately choose what software they run.
If node operators, miners, businesses, and exchanges reject that software, the developer has changed nothing except some lines of code sitting on the Internet. Even the official Bitcoin improvement proposal system makes this point remarkably clearly. Having a proposal accepted into the BIP repository does not mean the idea is good, does not mean the community supports it, and does not mean it will ever be adopted. A BIP is a proposal, not a command. And we are seeing an extraordinary real-world example of this right now with BIP 110
BIP 110 is called the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork. It was authored by Dathon Ohm, received its BIP number in December 2025, and reached complete status in June 2026
Its objective is controversial but straightforward. Temporarily restrict some of the ways people can store arbitrary data inside Bitcoin transactions. The argument from supporters is essentially that Bitcoin should primarily be money, not permanent storage for images and other arbitrary files. They argue that somebody can pay a miner once to put data into the blockchain, while thousands of node operators may then be left downloading, storing and serving that data indefinitely.
BIP-110 proposes a temporary one-year tightening of Bitcoin's consensus rules. Among other restrictions, it would limit certain data fields to 256 bytes, maintain an 83-byte limit for certain OP underscore return outputs, prohibit some currently undefined taproot features during the deployment, and limit the depth of certain taproot script structures.
That sounds unbelievably technical, but the power struggle behind it is fascinating. The proposed activation mechanism initially looks as though miners are in charge. BIP-110 sets a threshold of 55% of blocks in a 2016 block difficulty period signaling support. But then it gets more interesting. If that 55% threshold is not naturally reached, the proposal includes a mandatory signaling period. Under the BIP-110 rules, blocks between heights 961,632 and 963,647 that do not signal for the proposal would be considered invalid by nodes enforcing BIP-110.