A thing with no king still has to decide what it is. Bitcoin does it by tearing itself in half, on a schedule. Here is what its civil wars teach you about every leaderless system you belong to.
You have watched this happen
Think of a group you once belonged to.
Your friend circle. Your family around a table. A team you were on. Some little community that felt like yours. You were inside it. You trusted it. And then you watched it split, cleanly and bitterly, into two halves that stopped speaking.
Now, can you remember what actually caused it? Not how it felt. The reason.
I would bet it was something small. Who got the house. A message in the group chat. A seating plan at a wedding. Some tiny thing you could barely explain to an outsider without feeling a little silly.
Have you noticed that pattern in your own life? The nastier the split, the smaller the spark. People almost never break over the big things. They break over inches.
Theres even a name for it. One famous thinker called it the narcissism of small differences. The closer you are to someone, the more a tiny gap feels like betrayal. Your family knows this. Every old group chat you have ever muted knows this.
Hold that feeling for a second.
Because the most valuable money network your species has ever built did this exact thing to itself. Twice. And the thing it went to war over, the spark that split a billion dollar network straight down the middle, was smaller than a seating plan.
It was the size of a file.
The war almost nobody outside noticed
Between 2015 and 2017, Bitcoin fought a civil war.
It had a boring name. The block size war. And the thing they fought over sounds like nothing at all. The whole fight was over how big one block of transactions should be. One megabyte, the size it had always been, or something larger.
That is the whole spark. A few megabytes of data. Sounds like nothing worth losing a friend over, doesnt it?
But it turned vicious fast. Old friendships ended. Developers got hounded out. Big forums quietly banned people for taking the wrong side. For two years the loudest question in all of crypto was not the price of the coin. It was this one boring number.
Then, in August 2017, it broke for good. One side gave up on winning the argument. They copied the entire Bitcoin software, changed the block size, and launched their own rival coin. They called it Bitcoin Cash.
The money itself had cloned and split in two.
Why would grown adults split money over a file size?
Heres the part that matters. Both sides believed they were rescuing Bitcoin. That is what turns a technical argument into a holy war. Nobody thinks they are the villain.
Let me give you both cases honestly, because each one is genuinely strong.
One camp wanted to keep blocks small. Their logic runs like this. If blocks stay small, the full history of Bitcoin stays light enough that an ordinary person, anywhere on earth, can run the software on a cheap laptop and check every rule for themselves. You trust nobody. You verify everything. That is the actual magic. Make the blocks big, they warned, and soon only data centers can keep up. Bitcoin slowly turns back into a few giant machines. A new bank, just wearing a hoodie.
The other camp wanted bigger blocks, and their logic was just as sincere. Bitcoin was supposed to be money for the whole world. Actual cash. Something you spend on coffee in Jakarta or send home to your family in Lagos. Keep the blocks tiny and the fees climb, and the poorest people get priced out first. You end up with digital gold for the wealthy, not cash for everyone.
Read those two again. Both sides are trying to protect ordinary people. They just drew the circle of protection in a different place.
One side was guarding your right to check the money. The other was guarding your right to actually use it. Both are real freedoms. And they crashed straight into each other.
The strange problem of a thing with no king
Now here is what makes Bitcoin so odd, and so worth your time to understand.
Who was supposed to end this fight?
There is no CEO of Bitcoin. No head office. No president who bangs a gavel and simply picks the winning side. Satoshi, the mysterious person who built the thing, had vanished years earlier and never came back. That was deliberate.
So sit with the problem for a moment. Picture a billion dollars of money. A furious, years long disagreement about its future. And nobody, anywhere on the planet, with the authority to settle it.
A company would hold a board vote. A country would hold an election. A church would call a grand council. Bitcoin can do none of these things. There is no list of members. There is no voter roll. There is no room big enough to hold everyone, and no chairperson allowed to call the meeting to order.
So how does a leaderless thing decide anything at all?
There turns out to be only one answer. And once you see it clearly in Bitcoin, you start seeing it everywhere else too.
In a system with no king, you cannot win by out arguing people or out voting them. You can only win by walking out, and proving the crowd walks out with you.
How the war actually ended
Not with a vote. With an exit.
Economists have an old framework for exactly this. When you hate how something is being run, you get two basic options. Voice, which means stay and argue and try to reform it. Or exit, which means leave. Most systems in your life run mostly on voice. You complain, you vote, you petition, you post.
Bitcoin barely has voice. What it has, in almost unlimited supply, is exit. Anyone, at any moment, can copy the code and launch a rival. Bitcoin Cash was precisely that. A giant, coordinated exit.
And the moment someone exits, the question stops being about whose argument was cleverer. It becomes brutally, beautifully simple. Which version do people actually keep. Where the money flows. Which chain gets to keep the name.
There was one more twist first, and it mattered. The small block side did not wait for the big mining companies to agree. Ordinary users ran new software that forced the change through on their own, and they called the day it happened Bitcoin Independence Day. It proved something the whole system had never tested. The users, not the miners, held the final say.
After that the market became the only judge. Not a person, not a committee. The market.
So let me show you the verdict, because it is one of the most lopsided rulings in the history of money. Today Bitcoin, the small block chain that flatly refused to change, is worth around 1.7 trillion dollars.
Bitcoin Cash, the big block breakaway that was going to be real spendable cash for the whole planet, is worth around 6 billion. A few hundred times smaller than the thing it broke away from.
And when Bitcoin Cash itself later split again, into a version called Bitcoin SV, that spinoff now sits near 385 million. A rounding error. More than 96% below its own former peak.
The believers voted with their feet and their savings. The name stayed put. The value stayed put. The crowd looked at the exit, and mostly did not follow it.
The war that never actually ends
You would think a verdict that brutal would settle things forever. It did not. Not even close.
Because the block size was never really the fight. It was only the costume the real fight happened to wear that year.
The real fight is older and much simpler. What is Bitcoin actually FOR? Two answers have been at war since the beginning. Money, and strictly money. Or a free and open space where anyone can store anything, coins and messages and art and pure junk alike.
That question never got a final answer. Satoshi left before settling it. So it keeps coming back, in a fresh outfit each time.
In 2023 it returned as Ordinals. People found a clever way to stuff images into Bitcoin, tiny pictures riding inside the coin forever. The purists were furious. This is a monetary network, they said, not your photo album. Others just shrugged. It is permissionless. That was always the whole point. You dont get to decide what other people are allowed to store.
Right now, in 2026, the same war is back yet again, this time over a formal proposal to restrict that junk data by rule. One camp calls it cleaning the house. The other calls it censorship dressed up as tidying. One well known voice warned there are a hundred things more dangerous to Bitcoin than spam, and that quietly changing the rules to block transactions you dislike is the real danger. As I write, none of the biggest mining companies have backed the strict side. It is winning barely 1 to 3% of the network. Same war. New costume. Still no ending in sight.
So the chaos is the government
Here is where I changed my own mind while writing this.
I started out sure these wars were a weakness. A sign the whole project is a mess. A leaderless network clawing at itself just looks broken from outside.
Then, somewhere in the research, it flipped on me.
The wars are not a bug in Bitcoin. The wars are the government of Bitcoin. There is no other one. The fighting, the forking, the walking out, the market coldly picking a survivor: that entire ugly process IS how a thing with no ruler reaches a decision.
Think of it like an immune system. Up close it looks like violence. Fever, swelling, cells attacking. But that is really the body deciding what belongs inside it and what does not. Bitcoin runs a fever every few years. Each time, it settles a little more of what it is, with no single person anywhere in charge.
Is it messy? Completely. But it buys one thing nothing else in money can offer. Nobody can capture it by seizing the top, because there is no top to seize. You cannot bribe a king when the throne is empty.
Where the critics are right
I promised you honesty, so let me now argue against my own shiny idea.
The romantic version I just handed you has real holes.
First, every exit carries a cost. Each split confuses newcomers, burns enormous energy, and hands a free gift to everyone who says crypto is just a circus. The freedom to fork is also the freedom to fracture forever, over nothing.
Second, it is far less leaderless than the myth likes to pretend. A small circle of software developers still holds heavy influence over the code most people quietly run. The throne is empty, yes. But there is a quiet priesthood standing right beside it, and their software ships to millions of machines. That is power, even with no election behind it.
Third, exit only counts if you can genuinely leave. Almost nobody copies the code or moves their own coins. Most people stay wherever it is easiest, parked on a big exchange or inside a fund. For them, this grand freedom to fork is a theory they will never use. In practice, they drift wherever the app quietly points them.
I still think the schism engine is real, rare, and genuinely important. But it is rougher and less pure than its loudest fans admit. Both of those are true at once. It is how I have come to read the whole space. Not clean, not corrupt, just power finding its level the only way it can.
Why this is far bigger than Bitcoin
Step back, because this stopped being only about Bitcoin a long time ago.
The whole spine of this newsletter is that the world is slowly laying down shared, neutral money rails. Money that no single country gets to fully control. I lay the full map out in the pinned post, One Planet, 180 Currencies, and Somethings Broken.
But neutral money hides a hard problem, and Bitcoin just spent a decade living it out in public. If nobody is in charge, then who gets to change the rules? And if somebody can change the rules, was it ever really neutral?
Bitcoin is the first serious experiment in answering that. Its holy wars are not a sideshow to the main event. They are a preview of the exact fight every future neutral system will have to survive. Whoever lays the money rails of the next century inherits this same question. I went deeper into the machinery of it in why a blockchain cant be secretly changed.
And it reaches well past money. Every leaderless thing you belong to runs on these same buried rules.
Before you go
I am not here to tell you Bitcoin is doomed by its fighting, or secretly saved by it. I am not your financial advisor, and none of this is advice to buy or sell anything.
As I write, the coin sits near 86,000 dollars, still about a third below its record high, having just bounced hard off a rough stretch. The price is not the point. It never is, here.
The point is what the wars quietly reveal. Almost everything that calls itself leaderless is, underneath, quietly run by someone. Bitcoin is the rare case where the emptiness at the very top is genuinely real. You can watch, right out in the open, the strange and violent way a crowd learns to govern itself with no ruler at all.
That is worth understanding whether you own a single coin or none. Because more and more of your life, your money, your online worlds, your tools, is sliding onto systems that claim to have no king. Now you have a way to check whether thats actually true.
You watch who bleeds when it splits. Then you look at who is still standing, quietly, right next to the empty throne.
The market is always wearing clothes. Our job is to see it without them.
If you want to understand where money is really heading before it becomes obvious, this is the newsletter for it. Subscribe, and bring the friend who is still arguing with you about this in the group chat.
Keep reading
One Planet, 180 Currencies, and Somethings BrokenThe Study Bitcoin Doesnt Want You to SeeWho actually owns and controls the coin, counted from the ledger.Why a Blockchain Cant Be Secretly ChangedThe machinery underneath the wars: how the rules actually hold.Public vs Private BlockchainsWho gets to set the rules, and why that choice changes everything.
-More soon
Bitcoin Vs Bitcoin Cash was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.